The difference between Italy and Spain

Worry more about the former than the latter

It is tempting to lump Europe’s two big southern countries together. Italians and Spaniards talk loudly, eat late, drive fast and slurp down life-prolonging quantities of tomatoes and olive oil (such, at least, are the clichés). They were cradles of European anarchism in the 19th century and fascism in the 20th century; brushing dictatorship under the carpet before embracing Europe in the post-war years. During the euro-zone crisis from 2009 they were two components of the ugly acronym “pigs” (Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain) denoting particularly indebted economies. Today once more they are being mentioned in the same breath.

Italian volatility appears to be arriving on the Iberian peninsula. Spain’s once boringly bi-party politics has become a five-party kaleidoscope with the emergence of the hard-left Podemos, the centre-right Ciudadanos and most recently the hard-right Vox. It is increasingly polarised by battles over Catalan independence. Last summer Pedro Sánchez’s centre-left Socialists (psoe), backed by Catalan nationalists, toppled a centre-right People’s Party (pp) government. But the Catalans refused to back the new government’s budget, forcing Mr Sánchez to call an election for April 28th. A right-wing coalition of pp, Ciudadanos and Vox (which would surely inflame Catalan nationalism) or a deadlock and new elections are the most likely outcomes.

It can ill-afford either. The country’s recovery belies the urgency of pension, education and labour reforms, as well as nagging corruption and a rise in trans-Mediterranean migration. Years of political instability would leave these priorities unattended. Eurocrats note that Spain last year missed more deadlines for implementing eu legislation than any other member state. The sudden emergence of Vox and its embrace by other parties (it props up a pp-led government in Andalusia) evokes at once the country’s Francoist past and alarming parallels with Italy. There, the Northern League, once a peripheral Vox-like party, now dominates a chaotic, Eurosceptic coalition that is spooking markets as decades of negligible growth make its debt pile teeter.

Yet despite all that, fundamental differences to do with national metabolism, lost on some northern European officials, separate the two countries. Italy is shackled by conservatism and stasis. Its euro-zone crisis was (and is) the mild acceleration of a long-term national slump. gdp has barely grown since the late 1990s, making a debt mountain accumulated in earlier times unsustainable. Spain meanwhile hurtles forward, having grown by almost half during that period. Its euro-zone misery was more sharp and dramatic: a hyperactive construction boom raced off a cliff during the banking crisis, causing a spike in unemployment.

The difference between slow-metabolism Italy and fast-metabolism Spain goes beyond economic statistics. Decline has been the defining Italian experience of the past decades, so the new looks threatening and unwelcome there. But Spaniards have experienced the past decades as a time of rising prosperity and freedom after the drab Franco years. They are neophiles, willing to try anything that smacks of the future. The contrast between the two countries is that between Spain’s urban spaces, which gleam with futuristic architecture and public works, and Italy’s peeling cities; between Spaniards’ openness to social change and Italians’ conservatism; between the existential melancholy of Paolo Sorrentino’s films and the freneticism of Pedro Almodóvar.

A fast national metabolism has its downsides. Some of Spain’s shiny new infrastructure is wasteful and some Spaniards, especially in rural areas, resent the pace of change and are turning to Vox in protest. But it does also make Spain’s descent into reactionary Italy-style stagnation improbable. For one thing, its economy is fitter. Spain had a deeper euro-crisis but recovered faster, thanks to drastic economic reforms and spending cuts. Exports and fdi surged. Its gdp per person in purchasing-power terms overtook that of Italy in 2017 and is forecast to be 7% higher within five years. Heavy investment in roads and high-speed rail has made Spain’s infrastructure the tenth best in the world, says the World Economic Forum. Italy is 21st.

A sunny country

All of which translates into an outward-looking optimism. Mr Sánchez, who wants Spain to become a third partner in the Franco-German alliance, is particularly pro-eu, but the pp’s Pablo Casado admires Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats in Germany and Albert Rivera of Ciudadanos brandishes eu flags at his rallies. According to Eurobarometer, 68% of Spaniards view the eu positively compared with 36% of Italians. Vox directs its anti-establishment ire not at the eu so much as at feminists and separatist Catalans.

It also talks about immigration, but less than other European right-populist parties. Why? The foreign-born share of the population rose from 3% to 14% in the two decades to 2008, but Spaniards are more likely than any other eu population to declare themselves comfortable in social interactions with migrants (83% compared with 40% of Italians). Despite rising immigration from Africa and new efforts to improve border security, none of Spain’s main parties proposes to close ports or indulges in Mr Salvini’s brand of anti-migrant posturing. In other areas, too, Spaniards have left the chauvinism of the Franco years behind; a broad consensus backs gender equality and gay rights (equal marriage was introduced in 2005, behind only Belgium and the Netherlands).

Years of political chaos could threaten this picture. But if that applies to Spain, it applies to other European countries too, where the same fragmentation is taking place. Last year’s change of government, though fraught, was procedurally exemplary and proof that Spain’s young constitutional order now has at least the maturity of its western European neighbours. It is Italy, with its decades-old fractiousness and stagnation, that looks more out of kilter. Spain is different, goes the old saying. But Italy is more so