Zapatero

Of course, now that the orthopterans have joined forces with the Democratic Party, it must be a great disappointment to them that the Democratic Party's former idol, the shoemaker Zapatero, has been caught red-handed! If they were on opposing sides, do you know how they'd revel in it? But now they have to take a broad stance, and so the misfortunes of potential allies must be handled delicately, even if they violate honesty (cha cha cha).

We, who know our economics, aren't impressed by these alleged petty thefts. What struck us at the time, and continues to do so, as truly shocking is this:

that is, the fact that our friend thought he could finance himself with foreign capital ad infinitum , inflating the private sector deficit in his country beyond 10 percentage points of GDP (for those who don't know how to read this graph, the explanation is here ).

The graph, however, clarifies one point: Sanchez won't have a happy ending, but whatever his end, it will be for different reasons than those that befell Zapatero. Spain also has a foreign surplus today, but especially now, unlike in Zapatero's time, its private sector has a surplus of 5, not a deficit of 10! I see the threats elsewhere, and I believe the Spanish are starting to see them too .

We'll see what happens…

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This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2026/05/zapatero.html on Thu, 28 May 2026 16:45:40 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.