MADRID— Luis Garicano's penchant for bluntness has made him perhaps the best-known economist in Spain.
He has scolded two prime ministers and some of Spain's richest men. A scathing piece he co-wrote last year about a resume-padding politician got such avid response that the blog's server crashed.
Now Mr. Garicano, on leave from his professorship at the London School of Economics, is shaking up Spain's Dec. 20 election as the main policy architect of Ciudadanos, a once-obscure party whose surging popularity has been the surprise of the campaign.
Polls show neither the governing Popular Party nor the opposition Socialists close to winning an outright majority, and that could put center-right Ciudadanos in a kingmaker role.
Ciudadanos, Spanish for "citizens," was founded in 2006 in the wealthy region of Catalonia and focused on opposing the secessionist movement there. Mr. Garicano's policy expertise, the charisma of youthful party leader Albert Rivera—and widespread disenchantment with the ruling class after years of economic turmoil—has helped the party go national.
The older parties have been stepping up attacks on Ciudadanos, to little avail.
Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's conservative Popular Party, the main opposition Socialists and Ciudadanos were all running neck-and-neck in a poll late last month by Metroscopia. Political analysts say the most logical post-electoral alliance would be between the Popular Party and Ciudadanos. But Mr. Rivera has said that if Ciudadanos doesn't come out on top, he wouldn't back Mr. Rajoy for a second term.
With the country facing unemployment above 20% and a torrent of political scandals, Spain needs "a big bang reform," Mr. Garicano said in an interview.
The 48-year-old economist advocates overhauling an educational system that forces children to spend countless hours on rote work and has left Spain with the European Union's highest dropout rate. He wants to further revamp a labor law that creates two classes of workers: those nearly impossible to dismiss and those who can only get short-term jobs.
He's most emphatic about fighting patronage politics and cronyism.
"The two main parties have behaved like occupying armies when they take over government," he said, noting that even local hospital heads are political appointees.
One vital step, he said, will be overhauling regulatory agencies that he says have gotten too cozy with big corporations, political parties and other establishment interests. Another will be junking a development model based on big public infrastructure projects that has produced white elephants as well a host of kickback scandals.
Mr. Garicano, whose specialty is managerial economics, earned his doctorate in economics at the University of Chicago in 1998 and taught there before moving to London.
He has faced criticism for proposing sweeping solutions for a country he hasn't lived in for most of two decades. But he said that an outsider's perspective has served him well in seeing problems Spaniards at home were simply too close to.
Jordi Sevilla, an economist and former minister in a Socialist government, called Mr. Garicano a "magnificent academic" but said those skills wouldn't easily translate into success in the rough and tumble of governance. "When you give classes you give grades; when you run a ministry you are the one getting graded," he said.
Even some of Mr. Garicano's friends said it won't be easy getting establishment parties to go along with his proposals.
"You're basically asking a lot of people to commit hari kari," said Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde, a University of Pennsylvania economist who has written articles and academic papers with Mr. Garicano.
Mr. Garicano remains upbeat. Just the fact that the traditional parties probably won't dominate parliament will stop them from ramming through appointments to regulatory agencies, he said.
When then-Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero said in 2007, at the height of a real estate bubble, that Spain had made it into "the Champions League of the global economy," Mr. Garicano wrote an article refuting him. The economist said he could tell Spain was headed for problems on visits to his hometown of Valladolid, where real-estate developments were springing up right and left even though the population had been stagnant for decades.
After the property bubble burst in 2008, Mr. Garicano assumed a higher profile as cofounder of a widely read economics blog "Nada es Gratis," or "No Free Lunch," as he calls it in English. In 2012, he suggested Mr. Rajoy yield to a government of national unity.
He stopped editing the blog in 2013 and last year met Mr. Rivera, who was looking to strengthen his team. The economist praises Mr. Rivera for an "almost Clintonesque mix of intellect and empathy."
The 36-year-old Mr. Rivera said in an interview in April that he was attracted to Mr. Garicano's emphasis on "growth with a modern economy…but also with a social sensibility."
Said Mr. Garicano: "Albert Rivera told me we're going to treat Spaniards like adults. We're going to tell them things that no one else is telling them."
It Is quite unusual in Spain for an academic of Mr. Garicano's stature to take such a deep dive into party politics, said Pablo Simon, a political scientist at Madrid's Carlos III University. Generally party insiders with backgrounds in administration set Spain's policy agenda, he said.
But Mr. Simon noted that Ciudadanos faces plenty of challenges. While Mr. Garicano argues that Mr. Rivera's first-hand knowledge of Catalonia will help him resolve the impasse with secessionists there, Mr. Simon called Mr. Rivera a polarizing figure among Catalans.
Write to Matt Moffett at matthew.moffett@wsj.com
Source: Upstart in Spanish Election Gets Help From Blogging Professor
No comments:
Post a Comment