Welcome to the Euro Intelligence Podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me are Susanna Monsenk and Jack Smith.

Today we would like to talk about Spain. Pedro Sanchez almost resigned, but in the end didn't.

The crisis that appeared to be acute seems to be over now. But Jack, you wrote about this story.

You made an important point, which I think needs highlighting,

which is that there is a very significant gap between the economy of Spain, which is doing well,

in terms of the metrics that we, that we're used to, like GDP, even most recently,

productivity growth, and the politics, which has been getting progressively toxic.

Why is that? Before we kind of get to

why, it's just worth reiterating the sheer gap between the two of these things and explaining this a little bit more,

which is to say that Spain is currently the best performing large economy in Western and Central Europe.

Basically, if you take the Euro area countries and you look at the big

economies plus the UK, Spain is doing the best out of all of them in terms of economic growth.

This week, of course, we saw provisional, you know, first quarter GDP data for Europe being

released. And Spain, well, first of all, Spain beat expectations. The expectation from most economists was around not.

0.4% growth for the quarter, and Spain actually did not.7.

You know, that's an annualized growth rate of 2.4%, which is really, really good when you consider

that, for instance, France's economy is barely growing, and Germany's economy has been contracting

recently. You have that very strong performance there, and Germany's economy has been contracting recently.

You have that very strong performance there, and that's been pretty consistent, I think,

for the last year or so.

Since the recovery from the pandemic, Spain has been doing pretty well economically, very

well relative to the rest of Europe.

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