The vice-president of Economic Affairs, Nadia Calviño, tried yesterday to reassure the members of the Cercle d’Economia about the consequences that the electoral progress will have in Spain’s rotating presidency of the EU from today Thursday . The number two of the Central Government rejected that the decision generates “vertigo”, as the president of the Cercle, Jaume Guardiola, warned him when he presented it at the closing ceremony of the entity’s annual meeting.
“Thinking about the last five years, an election is the least dizzying thing to do to society”, said the vice-president during the conversation she held with Guardiola. Calviño closed the conference in place of Pedro Sánchez, who declined to participate on Monday after calling a surprise election.
The vice-president, who spoke a few hours after the president of the PP, Alberto Nuñez Feijóo, assured with a pre-campaign tone that “with the PSOE that has led the economic policy there is no uncertainty. It is known and with positive results”. In his final speech, before giving the floor to Calviño, Guardiola maintained a harsh tone in relation to the progress of the elections: “You know that at the Cercle we are people of order and you will therefore understand that this unexpected call for elections cause us some vertigo”. The former CEO of Banco Sabadell specified this fear not only during the “two more months of electoral contention”, but also because “it is difficult for us to understand how this will affect our presidency of the Council of the European Union in the second half of the ‘year”.
At the end of the intervention, some partners commented that they had not been calmed by Calviño’s words. Just as the president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, did the day before, the vice-president baffled the nearly half a thousand attendees with macroeconomic figures to ensure that the Spanish economy is improving. “Since the financial crisis we have had a lost decade, we have gone backwards”, he pointed out. He said this with reference to the Circle’s Opinion Note, in which the entity warned that (and Catalonia) had become poorer in relation to the euro zone in terms of GDP per capita.
Calviño contrasted this lost decade with the management of the Sánchez Government, which has allowed the Spanish economy to begin “to recover” and cited indicators such as the risk of poverty, GDP and employment, which “allowed us they return to the point before the crisis” of 2008.
The vice-president affirmed that the central government will meet the objectives of reducing the deficit and the debt in 2023 thanks to a policy that “has made it possible to correct the imbalances”. Regarding the improvement in tax revenues, Calviño pointed out that it is due to the emergence of the underground economy, apart from the increase in employment and activity.
Regarding Catalonia, he insisted that “it has absolutely extraordinary assets that we are betting on and investing in”.
