No matter how much political make-up and spin-doctoring is applied to the matter, the provisional figures for Spain's year-on-year consumer price index (IPC) for this month of August are horrific. For the third consecutive month, inflation is in double digits and the slippage from last month's 10.8% to today's 10.4% confirms only that the measures taken by Pedro Sánchez's government are not closing the gap and that if it were not for the fall in fuel prices they wouldn't have even dropped by the few tenths of a percent that we have seen. At present, there is no reason for optimism and the statements made by the first deputy prime minister, Nadia Calviño, are not even an empty gesture, since the data speaks for itself.
If you add to this appalling consumer price index the figure for underlying inflation - a calculation which excludes energy and fresh products - the picture is even bleaker, because this month that latent rate climbs to 6.4%, and it hasn't done anything but grow every month for more than a year. It is important to remember that, in June 2021, it was 0.2%. Yes, in between, a war began, that in Ukraine, which is having a direct impact on the economy. But not all countries are facing the same utility bill increases and, what is more serious, it will not leave the same consequences in all countries.
Thus, the economic forecasts made for the end of the year - they already show a certain consistency, since there are only four months left - are that Spain could close December having seen a fall from the current peak of the interannual increase in the IPC and, perhaps, leaving it at around 8%. This would be around 5 percent more than before the invasion of Russian troops ordered by Vladimir Putin at the end of last February. Very different is the behaviour of the euro zone countries which are forecast to have an annual IPC of 4.3%, only 0.8 percent more than they did at the February 2022 reference date, when the war began. In other words, while for Spain the war has added almost five percent in six months, the average of the euro zone does not reach one single percentage point.
And these are not just numbers. They are measures of poverty, of insurmountable problems for vulnerable families and of falls in the purchasing power of citizens in their shopping baskets and monthly bills, when one tenth of salaries and retirement savings have as good as evaporated, gobbled up by inflation on the 1st of every month. This situation is arousing the mobilization of social players, some tentative moves have begun to be seen, with the economy acting like a boomerang against the government of turn.