While Pedro Sánchez insists on denying the obvious from within the private ivory tower of the Moncloa government palace in which, at one time or another, all Spanish prime ministers end up living, the economic crisis is already showing how imminent it is. The unemployment data released this Wednesday is staggering: we have passed through the worst July in the last 20 years. Unemployment has risen by several thousand and the number of people affiliated with Social Security has fallen for the first time in a month of July. On the eve of their 20-day vacation, the longest since they arrived in Moncloa, the Sánchez-Gómez couple and their two daughters are preparing to journey shortly to Lanzarote, to the royal residence of La Mareta, and afterwards, to the Doñana reserve, both of them state-owned estates.
In the meantime, Sánchez keeps us entertained over the temperature mark to be set for heating in winter and that for air conditioning in summer, while the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, who already demonstrated during the coronavirus that, for her, votes were more important than deaths, now threatens to defy the PSOE's energy saving measures and turn up the heating knob as if it were a normal winter as well as winding up the air con as she might do any summer. Ayuso, in electoral campaign mode, pulled the idea from up her sleeve during the coronavirus crisis that Madrid was a space of liberty and swept the board electorally. Let's hope she doesn't pull a similar trick on Sánchez again, since it is difficult for the Spanish PM to convince us of the need to save energy when the most he has done is appear at a press conference without a tie.
The latest known tourism data, that for June, indicates that the pre-pandemic level has not yet been reached and that levels were close to 85% of the 2019 figures - fifteen points less, which is no small thing. The speeches of Sánchez, advising us to look at the unemployment data with different eyes, and deputy PM Calviño, pointing out that it is necessary to stop looking at the monthly figures and look at the background trends, are almost a provocation, since the most worrying aspects of the Spanish economy are the underlying trends, the rise in inflation to almost a whole point above double digits as well as the serious threat of recession.
But it seems that there is no interest in wanting to see these things among the PSOE-Unidas Podemos coalition government presided over by Pedro Sánchez and that the important thing is that people go on holiday in as carefree a way as possible and when they get back they can cope with getting hit for six. Neither stopping consumption, nor sending alarming messages. The politics of the ostrich, ignoring the problems and dangers on the horizon as the state's only approach, must come to an end.