For someone who used to excel over the short distance of 100 metres, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba has a lot of distance to cover in the coming months. Not only must he lead the Socialist Party through a long pre-campaign ahead of general elections to be held either this autumn or in the spring of 2012, he also has to overhaul the Partido Popular’s (PP) double-digit lead in the polls.
Given those circumstances, perhaps it was understandable that on Saturday, at his official unveiling as the party’s candidate, Rubalcaba offered a set of policy guidelines that reached out unashamedly to traditional Socialist voters. The interior minister is so relaxed when addressing a room full of people that he may as well be brushing his teeth, and so it was when he coolly informed Socialist Party members of the direction they must now head in.
There was a crowd-pleasing, albeit non-specific, swipe at banks, as Rubalcaba suggested they re-invest some of their earnings for the greater good: “Soon it will be the moment to ask the cajas and banks to leave part of their profits to the creation of jobs. Because they can, and young people can’t wait.” He also mooted the return of the capital tax that his own Socialist Party had eliminated in the good times. Rubalcaba acknowledged this u-turn, adding that “now the time has come for us to rethink this and bring [the tax] back.”
Perhaps most surprisingly, he opened the door to electoral reform, an area the Socialists have rarely looked interested in overhauling. “We have to listen to what the man in the street tells us,” he said. “When people start thinking that all politicians are all the same, that their vote doesn’t mean anything, then democracy has a problem.” This made abundantly clear the influence the 15-M or indignados protest movement has had on the thinking of the astute Rubalcaba, an influence that became apparent several weeks ago when he took the unusual step of staging Q-and-A sessions with Socialist militants around the country.
Saturday’s speech underlined Rubalcaba’s political nous and his rare ability to get a message across. But whether he’s threatening to punish banks or increase state control of urban development (another proposal he mooted), a major problem with responding so suddenly to the man in the street is the inevitable charge of lack of ideological conviction.
The other problem for Rubalcaba, of course, is Zapatero, who is still prime minister and party leader. The agreement between the two of them is that Zapatero will continue to unroll his deeply unpopular reform program in a bid to keep Spain away from bankruptcy, while Rubalcaba champions the kind of popular, socially oriented policies that the prime minister would like to be able to implement.
Only time will tell whether this two-headed approach can work. For the PP’s Esteban González Pons, the interior minister’s hour-long speech simply showed that Rubalcaba is Zapatero “but without the eyebrows”. That was missing the point: eyebrows or not, this speech could not have been more removed from the Zapatero we have seen over the last couple of years.
In any other circumstances, it would have been a visionary, radical declaration, a speech utterly in tune with the electorate and which sought to save Spain from rampant real estate corruption, a bloated deficit, soaring unemployment and an unbalanced electoral system.
But it’s too late for all that. And given the gap in the polls, Rubalcaba knows he can promise what he likes, because there’s very little chance he will be in a position to implement a single one of these policies.
Guy Hedgecoe is co-editor of Iberosphere, a website that offers analysis and commentary on Spain and Portugal.
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