Besides, most people had other things on their minds, not least the prospect of making money. In the housing boom that lasted from the mid-1990s to 2007, Spain built more homes than France, Germany and the UK combined. And it wasn’t just housing. Towns with populations of tens of thousands built airports, while new roads and high-speed rail lines spread like spiderwebs across the country. And with each development came the opportunity for unscrupulous politicians and businessmen like Correa to rig contracts. Today, many of these dodgy housing developments and infrastructure projects stand abandoned, ruins of an age of excess. Trying to wean Spain off building, quipped one economist following the crash, was like quitting hard drugs. [...]
The revelations came as the economic crisis began to take hold, galvanising anger about corruption. In 2011, unemployment reached 22%. Almost one in two young people were out of work. In May 2011, protesters, most of them young, began occupying plazas in Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia to protest bank bailouts, austerity and corruption. They were known as the indignados, the outraged ones. More than 6 million people took part over weeks of protests. National surveys showed overwhelming support for the movement, which transcended traditional party lines. A generation of young people with few job prospects began questioning the assumptions that had underpinned Spain’s young democracy. “Gürtel was the ‘emperor has no clothes’ moment for Spain,” said Carlos Delclós, a former indignados activist and author of a book on the movement and its political inheritor, Podemos. “Gürtel made it clear that it was not specific cases of corruption but that it was systemic. That corruption was the system.” [...]
Between 2012 and 2014, at the height of austerity, it seemed as if everywhere you looked some previously respectable representative was on trial for stealing public money. Even the royal family, it seemed, were at it: a corruption scandal centred on the then king’s son-in-law, Iñaki Urdangarin, threw the monarchy into disrepute. In 2014, the once popular King Juan Carlos abdicated, citing health reasons, amid a sharp decline in popularity. (Last year, Urdangarin was sentenced to six years in jail for tax fraud and embezzlement.) [...]
For the PP, the verdict was devastating: the party itself was convicted as a direct beneficiary of the Gürtel scheme. The court found that ever since the party was founded, it had maintained a parallel accounting system to collect money from kickbacks that could be used to fund the party. The court said the testimony of Rajoy and other PP figures who denied knowing about the existence of the slush fund were “not credible”. The reputational damage was far worse than the actual punishment, which amounted to a fine of just €240,000. (The sentence would have been considerably harsher if the case was tried today, after a 2015 change in the law made illegal party financing a crime.)
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