Aug Posted by glhermine. Turnout: PP EPP The roots of this growth — and, subsequently, the collapse and prolonged economic crisis — was a rapid property boom between and , characterized by an exponential increase in housing prices and a booming construction industry.
Politicians, banks, the construction industry and Spanish homeowners in general were all complicit in the bubble. Similar to the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States, Spanish banks — especially the cajas de ahorro savings banks — granted mortgage loans on extremely lax terms.
Some of the regions which became the most heavily indebted were the coastal boom regions of the Valencian Community, Catalonia, the Balearic Islands, Murcia and Andalusia but also interior regions such as Castilla-La Mancha.
Pedro Solbes, the Socialist finance minister at the time, repeatedly dismissed all warning signs of the impeding collapse as being extremely exaggerated. However, with GDP growth collapsing to only 0.
Between the third quarter of and the first quarter of , for example, the unemployment rate increased dramatically from Several cajas threatened to go under, having invested heavily in the construction industry, and the government intervened to inject liquidity into several of them beginning in In this context, the opposition PP — despite its deadwood leader, Mariano Rajoy, having lost two successive elections in and and the party failing to generate much enthusiasm at all, was the runaway favourite to win.
