MADRID–According to the Al Jazeera TV channel, Madrid, Spain’s capital, was the scene of two large demonstrations by railway workers and teachers, a sign of the evident increase in social protests in this country.
In an effort to counter the effects of inflation driven by record increases in fossil fuel prices – the latest figure, by the way, downward, marks plus 8.9 percent annually – Pedro Sánchez last week launched a three-billion-euro package that increases and extends bill discounts to 40 percent of the country’s households.
A few days earlier, the Spanish government had passed measures aimed at easing the tax burden on lower incomes by slightly tightening taxation on higher incomes and large assets.
Effectively, the investment in social policies of the red-purple government is substantial, and now one hopes to see the effects. Because, from a social point of view, the situation is not very comforting. For even though unemployment has fallen substantially in the past year, inequality has risen sharply in Spain, first because of the pandemic and now because of rising prices and tariffs.
