What the Spanish government assured was not going to happen has happened again: the consumer price index (IPC) for June has climbed to double digits, sitting at 10.2%, a figure certainly unacceptable for any economy and even less so in the midst of the turbulent situation facing the government of Pedro Sánchez. An IPC of this level has not been seen since April 1985 - that is, 37 years and two months ago. Although a significant part of the rise is due to the price of petrol and food, a great deal of attention needs to be paid to the complementary data such as the underlying inflation rate - the price increase built into the consumer price index when neither energy products nor unprocessed food are included - and that statistic has risen 0.6 of a point to 5.5 percent, the highest since 1993.
It should be noted, precisely because people often forget to do so, that inflation does nothing but deprive us of purchasing power in our shopping baskets and erode the value of our savings. And as a consequence, correcting it should be the first priority of both the Spanish and the Catalan governments. It is not possible to increase public spending indefinitely in the current conditions and governments should rethink, as any individual or entrepreneur has to, policy proposals, which may certainly be very well-intentioned, but difficult to fit into the current economic situation. I know there is no ruler who can say no to a long-awaited demand, because it is very unpopular and electorally dangerous. There are enough precedents of the cost that this exacted on some politicians, and not very many years ago.
But the outlook that is sketched from the month of September onwards is that of a perfect storm. With the war in Ukraine provoked by Vladimir Putin's invasion demanding economic resources according to the agreements signed with Zelenski, while Russia cuts gas to the countries to whom it has not yet done so. The consequences of all this will be a petrol price even higher than the current peaks as well as difficulties in some countries such as Germany with the arrival of winter. There are many who think that it will not go this far and that politics or diplomacy will find the way to redirect what it has failed to do so far, but the fact is that uncertainty is high and when one talks to the different European chancelleries, one finds a dominant pessimism, not without a certain concern about being the guinea pigs in the struggle between the United States and China.
In this context, it is not so strange that the Spanish government has forced the resignation of the president of the National Statistics Institute (INE) in order to establish a different calculation for the IPC and GDP. Killing the messenger will not solve the problem for the Spanish economy. Nor will it be achieved by airbrushing the statistics, as the ominous panorama is what it is. The fact that the Spanish government has preferred to carry the cost of firing a senior public servant and interfering in the independence of the institute is a sign that the goal is to try to sell a different truth to lessen the impact in the face of winter's worrying prospect. Because the reality is too harsh and maybe the time has come when they need to start telling us about it.