One of the great montages of the recent history of Spain has been the so-called “economic miracle” of the first years of José María Aznar’s government. The GDP skyrocketed to be on the heels of Italy’s; The debt, deficit and inflation fell to unprecedented levels, and jobs were created in abundance, to the point that our country was baptized as “Europe’s employment factory.” The international media poured out daily praise for the president and his Minister of Economy, Rodrigo Rato, to whom they attributed a kind of magical power over public finances that allowed a country of bullfighters and dancers to now rub shoulders with the most powerful and serious people on the planet. This media enthusiasm went in parallel with a powerful advertising campaign from Moncloa that spread by land, sea and air the supposed wonder that was taking place in Spain. One of the most fervent admirers of the “miracle” was the Italian Silvio Berlusconi, the star European of the moment.
In reality, the “miracle” was not much of a mystery. Europe as a whole was experiencing a wave of unprecedented prosperity that irrigated its entire geography to a greater or lesser extent. Spain was by far the main beneficiary of the juicy European Cohesion Fund that Felipe González had obtained at the time, whom Aznar, then in the opposition, called a “beggar” for negotiating it. The PP Government had completed the privatization of the Crown jewels, which allowed fabulous amounts of resources to be brought in to balance the public accounts. It had also promoted excessive land liberalization policies, encouraging a boom real estate of unprecedented dimensions. It had also promoted a banking concentration of such magnitude that it transmitted to the world the image of a country with financial muscle. And he had delved into the deregulation of the labor market, turning Spain not into the “employment factory of Europe” that palace analysts saw, but into the country with the highest volume of junk contracts on the continent.
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