By IANS/EFE,
Madrid : Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has said that Spain was “on the verge” of coming out of recession. He defended the solvency of the country’s economy, which had been questioned in certain financial circles in recent days.
The prime minister made the assessment during a parliamentary session in which the opposition accused him of continuously improvising and not acting forcefully in the face of the serious crisis Spain is going through, with more than 4 million people unemployed, and – moreover – of being “beset by the markets”.
“He squandered the government’s credibility,” Mariano Rajoy, the leader of the conservative opposition Popular Party, said, calling on Zapatero to present a credible plan to reduce the deficit and the public debt.
The prime minister turned to economic figures from the last quarter of 2009 to bolster his argument, data that shows that the economy declined just 0.1 percent during that period, and he predicted that Spain is on the road out of the depths of the recession.
Counting that period, the Spanish economy has had seven consecutive quarters of declines and five year-on-year pullbacks, but the fall in the gross domestic product (GDP) in the last three months of 2009 moderated substantially and is moving farther away from the year-on-year 3.1 percent decline, figures released by the Banco de Espana show.
Zapatero said that the Spanish economy “is not worse than six months ago”, although doubts about its solvency moved through the markets over the past week, during which the stock market suffered its greatest drop since October 2008 after having risen about 50 percent over the previous 10 months.
Spain’s government, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU, tried to contain the international suspicions by sending top economic officials, including Minister Elena Salgado, to London and Paris at the beginning of this week to explain the scheduled measures to reduce the deficit from 11.4 percent to 3 percent in three years and give a push to the recovery.