- After its electoral successes, the only thing the EPP lacks is a common political agenda.
Five days before the Spanish parliamentary elections last sunday, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, top candidate of the governing party PSOE (PES), delivered a speech on the economic problems of the country, the main issue of the electoral campaign, and proposed his solutions for them. The options were two: either the European Central Bank should intervene massively and buy Spanish government loans – or the European Council had to adopt a public investment programme which Spain itself can't afford. The problem: Both options depend on European institutions, which means that even winning the elections Rubalcaba would not have been able to impose them himself. But, as El País wrote with some mockery: "at least, it should not fail because of lack of ideas". By contrast, the leader of the opposition, Mariano Rajoy from the conservative Partido Popular (EPP), didn't even bother to formulate an economic agenda. Instead, both candidates just went complaining around about "Merkozy" (see El País), until finally this paradoxical campaign came to an end and the PSOE suffered the disastrous defeat everybody expected, which means that over the course of 2011, there has been a government change in all five countries suffering most from the Euro crisis: Ireland, Portugal, Geece, Italy, and Spain.
