Spain is the country that will emerge from the coronavirus pandemic with its economy most damaged and it will be number one in the world ranking of economic falls in 2020. That is the bleak prediction which the International Monetary Fund has made on this diluted day of Sant Joan, after the economic body's latest meeting in which it modified its April forecasts in view of the data now known, analyzing the 18 largest economies in the world. A 12.8% drop in 2020, and growth of only 6.3% in 2021, mean that, for the Spanish economy this crisis will not take the form of a V, and only at the end of 2022 will it reach a situation similar to 2019 if everything goes more or less positively. It will also need a bailout, with harsh conditions on economic reforms. In short, poverty unknown in Spain in recent decades, unemployment above 25% and a significant increase in the deficit, which will rise above 120%.
With this announcement, the IMF has turned upside down some of the analyses made by the Spanish government linking an increase in consumption with an improvement in the economy. There is none of this, and the proposition is a false reflection due to the distortion of having gone many weeks without consumption. The IMF report is also devastating in another respect: the countries that have done worse with the coronavirus are the ones that will suffer the most, with Spain and Italy at the forefront. In contrast, Greece and Portugal, which took action when they had to, have better economic forecasts. Although some don't appreciate being told so, a reminder does not go amiss: if the Spanish government had locked down Madrid when requested by different voices, with the Catalan government at the forefront, the situation today could perhaps be very different.
The truth is that it was not done and that Spain is heading at dizzying speed toward a disaster due to a triple crisis: a collapsed economy, with symptoms suggesting a long stay in the ICU and a foreign medical team monitoring the patient's evolution; the degradation of many of its institutions, starting with the head of state itself, but as well, the justice system, the Constitutional Court and the Civil Guard, among others; and a territorial conflict, with a part of the state, Catalonia, demanding a new independence referendum on separating from Spain, having its main leaders in prison or exile after the first vote that took place in October 2017.
Perhaps the time has come for the government to start telling its people the truth and putting aside the lies and permanent propaganda of the executive, which, via enormous disbursement of funds manages to silence any criticism and present an unreal Spain to the public. The government has lied so much and about so many things that it will have great difficulty in finding a common thread based on the truth. It is not surprising that deputy PM Carmen Calvo, in a Freudian moment in parliament, ended up saying on Wednesday that she did not intend to restore the credibility of the state institutions because you can never restore what has never existed. Never has a slip of the tongue come so close to the truth.