Is Spain doing well?

The lights of Spanish cities such as Vigo, Madrid, Badalona, ​​lit among others in this Advent, allows us to get excited about Christmas and its celebrations: It is a time of encounters in which human beings show their most friendly side and, if you like, are festive and supportive at the same time.

The reality of Spanish society, at least at this time, lives quite far from the current one. political crisis, every day more poisoned in robberies and arrests linked to corruption of one sign or another, which allow us to remember that explanation by Julián Marías, when he distinguished between real Spain and official Spain.

Official Spain is not doing well politically, although the increasingly emaciated President Sánchez intends to address the scandals of recent days and weeks with arrests of people around him who we do not know where it will take us. Without budgets, without a clear and sufficient parliamentary majority on the horizon, anything can happen. He resist is conquerr of Negrín, is not always fulfilled.

The Real Spain is doing well depending on each individual and depending on the economic sectors and regions, although Economic indicators allow economic managers to take advantage of their chestsby being able to show figures of sustained economic growth -2.9% of GDP-, higher than those of other European countries such as Germany or France.

A relatively controlled inflation, around 3%, -although the shopping basket and the rise in prices of goods and services-, does not always correspond to official figures, they allow economic indicators to be balanced.

A different issue is the unemployment figure (10.5-12%, around 2.5 million unemployed), despite the increase in workers’ affiliation to Social Security, 21.8 million in November 2025which in theory maintain almost fifty million Spaniards together with the business world and the State debt.

Surely with such a high number of unemployed and with such low parameters in productivity (64.6% of the German and 67% of the French) and increase in absenteeism from work (rate from 7 to 7.4%), only the cushion of the welfare state with a rampant debt (more than 102% of GDP) pallow you to maintain the calm in which Spanish society seems to live, with exceptions.

The figures of growing and illegal emigration (760,000 until 2024) are worrying in many cases in terms of security, where the State does not take the appropriate steps for their training and benefit for the sake of the employability of so many necessary jobs that in our country, Spaniards, even if they are unemployed, do not want to fill.

There are other serious problems such as the shortage of housing or its exorbitant price, the deterioration of health services, due among other factors to the paradigm shift of the health system still unresolved and a growing number of population, not reciprocated by the increase in health services.

Only since 1996, Spain has increased by more than 10 million inhabitants (emigration) and the progression seems geometric, when the national demographics ( fertility rate around 1.2 children per woman) live a demographic winter already sustained for decades.

Is Spain doing well with these economic indicators? Well, it all depends on the color of the glass you look through. It is evident that they are strokes that mark a trend on economic well-being, normally of a macroeconomic nature, that serve to test or test the degree of well-being of a society. To make the above more precise, we would lack the discomfort indicators: poverty, city ghettos, educational failure rate, increase in crime, etc. It is only, therefore, a brushstroke.

Some foreign analysts wonder how a country without budgets (central State), and with so much political tension, not only works, but grows in the terms set forth.

It is a good question that does not allow for a simplistic or triumphalist answer, in the tone that the Government is doing very well in the economic area, look at the stock market at its highest (IBEX 35 at 17,000 points), or the growing foreign investor appetite!, etc., although positive government actions cannot be ruled out either.

The truth and truth is that Spain, which was badly hit by COVID with serious damage to employability and its industrial fabric (-12% of GDP), was able to take the leap forward thanks to European aid (140,000 million between non-refundable aid and soft loans), which reactivated the economy, maintained social peace and allowed an increase in tourism income, due to the spectacular moment that Spain is experiencing in this economic sector. And it reactivated domestic demand.

For this reason, it has caused surprise and disappointment that our country can renounce nearly 60,000 million in European aid, pretexting its unnecessaryness, when the causes that motivated it have not even been explained in a clear and convincing manner. And even more so if it is due to negligence in the management of the conditionality of NG/EU Fundsthat is, the political and economic reforms, which are conspicuous by their absence.

The lights of Christmas should not overlook this fact, which can lead to the fact that in a short time economically it can be said not only that Spain is not doing well, but that it is doing badly!