“Spain is a better country today than it was six years ago, and there is no doubt that in 2027 it will be better than in 2024.” This is how this Monday the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, cleared up the questions about his vocation to conclude the legislature despite the difficulties in maintaining the parliamentary majority that he invested in him, which he himself has recognized. In his year-end balance sheet, Sánchez has presented as support for remaining in Moncloa the economic “data” and what he has considered the recovery of territorial cohesion after the end of the Catalan process, although he has assumed pending tasks in employment and housing . The socialist leader has reiterated his intention to meet with Carles Puigdemont and Oriol Junqueras, but without a specific date.
The Head of the Executive appeared for more than an hour at the Moncloa Palace after the last Council of Ministers in 2024 to present the balance of the year and the political priorities for the coming year. A 2025 that will start with a complicated budget negotiation in which the Government will have to convince partners with approaches as distant as Junts and Podemos.
To both sides, Sánchez has offered today a string of economic and social data that should serve to defuse the temptations of bringing down the Executive if next year’s General Budgets are not published. “We tripled growth, improving the projections of economic organizations,” said Sánchez.
This same Monday, the Ministry of Economy announced that Spain grew by 0.8% in the third quarter of 2024 due to consumption and public spending, which places the interannual rate at 3.3%.
A fact that, according to Sánchez, “allows us to head into the beginning of 2025 as one of the most promising economies in the West.” “This year the GDP has increased more than one point above what was forecast in 2023 by the Commission,” said the president. “Today we export more than Germany,” he said, to praise a “very outstanding generation of wealth,” with “the largest number of people working in the history of the country.” And all, despite the “context”: the covid19 crisis, first, the war in Ukraine, later, and one that has been added to the list: “the reactionary advances.”
Sánchez has assured that Spain has more people employed than ever, and has defended that in 2024 “400,000 jobs will have been created, more than Germany and Italy combined.”
“Spain is advancing, progressing and will continue to do so in 2025,” concluded Sánchez, who has maintained that there are “many factors behind the economic success” achieved by his successive governments since he assumed the Presidency in June 2018.
Among them, Sánchez has cited the improvement of the “territorial” situation. The leader of the PSOE recalled that he arrived at the Moncloa shortly after the independence of Catalonia had been proclaimed, although in a token capacity. Six years later, he said, Spain “is making progress” in recovering that lost normality, with Sánchez’s “meetings” with “almost all” the regional presidents, “reinforcing bilateral ties”, with an “improvement of the regional system.”
“Economic relations between autonomous communities have grown again, they have reached an increase of 24%, nothing more and nothing less since 2018,” he said. “Also labor mobility between territories,” he added. “And transfers to regional governments have increased by 15%,” he noted. On the contrary, Sánchez continued, the “conflict” between administrations has been reduced: from 52 rulings by the Constitutional Court in 2018 to eight in 2024.
The President of the Government has reiterated, as he did a year ago, his intention to meet with the two leaders of the Catalan independence parties, recently re-elected to their positions: Carles Puigdemont and Oriol Junqueras. “Catalan society and Spanish society as a whole have turned the page on what happened in 2017,” he said. Of course, without specifying a date.
Housing, poverty and unemployment, the Government’s debts
Pedro Sánchez has made an optimistic summary of 2024 in economic and environmental matters. But he has also assumed that the Executive’s management has not managed to reverse some of the main problems that Spain is facing and that he himself has pointed out: Housing, poverty and unemployment.
Sánchez has assured that his Government has “defended the purchasing power of seniors and workers” with the increases in pensions and the SMI. “Spain is managing to reduce inequality,” he maintained. “The distribution of income is 1.5 points more equal than in 2018,” he added. “In the last six years, disposable income in real terms has grown by 9%,” he pointed out. A growth that, he said, has been “progressive” since “it has increased almost three times more in working class households than in privileged ones.”
However, he said “knowing” is “not enough.” “We are very far from where we should be as a country, even if we wanted to,” he assumed, to point out the “levels of inequality and poverty, especially child poverty, absolutely unacceptable for a developed economy like ours.”
“We cannot fall into complacency,” he insisted when talking about “pending tasks” such as “housing.” And he added: “Spain continues to have an unemployment rate that is too high, levels of labor productivity that we have to continue improving and spending on research that is still low if we compare ourselves with the rest.”
The president has not offered specific recipes for these problems that he himself has pointed out, and has emphasized that Spain is “better today than a year ago.” “And of course, much better than in 2018,” he concluded.
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