National
Zapatero still tries to avoid the crisis word
By h.b. - Jun 30, 2008 - 7:21 AM
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The Spanish Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, has said that it was questionable whether Spain is in a current economic crisis. ‘What the citizen feels is that the economy is worse than in 2007’, Zapatero said in an interview with El País newspaper yesterday. However he said that concepts such as recession, slow down or crisis, belonged more to the academic ambit.
He said Spain would grow by some 2% this year, the same growth seen in France, Italy and Germany over the past four years, and that Spain was above the European average.
Zapatero also confirmed that he would not allow the referendum being planned by the lehendakari, Juan José Ibarretxe, to go ahead, and he defended the new European legislation on immigration which he described as ‘a progressive advance’ in which there were guarantees for the return of immigrants and over their stay in immigrant reception centres.
Speaking at the PSOE party congress in Navarra yesterday he said that the Socialists had no identity problems, in an attack on the PP who he described as ‘dressing up’.
On the other side of the political spectrum, a week after the PP party conference in Valencia, the PP regional president of Madrid, Esperanza Aguirre, told El Mundo newspaper yesterday that the majority of PP voters are upset with what she called ‘the permanent journey to the centre’ of the party. She lamented that many in the party who used to praise José Maria Aznar, now only had criticism and insults for the previous P.P. Prime Minister. She said the party conference had done nothing to integrate the critical wing of the party.
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