Spain: Parliament Protest As Jobless Rate Rises

Around 1,000 demonstrators take to the streets of Madrid as the unemployment crisis in Spain accelerates.

受到财政紧缩政策影响，西班牙一季度失业率升至37年来最高。首都马德里爆发大规模示威游行，抗议失业率上升。游行最后发展为大规模冲突，造成约30人受伤。据悉，西班牙一季度失业率为27.2%，较上季度的26.02%继续攀升，也高于市场预期的26.5%。一季度岗位流失32.2万个、失业率排在欧元区第二位，仅次于希腊。

It was a minority demonstration. Radical groups say they want to dissolve parliament and dissolve the government and everything. But they are a great, they are minority. I don’t think the anger is spreading onto the streets, though the question of unemployment is so worrying, it’s a wonder that people are not angry.

Yeah, let me ask you about that, because we now have two million households out of 17 million in Spain when no person has a job, what can the prime minister do with that? Because there is not a lot of fact that can be trimmed, is there?

No, they can’t. In fact, trimming more fact may give rise to more unemployment. We don’t have the figures in the Europe status figure as we have. The figures for the reduction unemployment in the financial industry, those are coming. And then there will be reduction also in public jobs because it’s been the private sector that has shed from the year of 2007, something has shed, something like 3.2 million people while employment in the public sector has grown by 80,000, so I think there’s some more bad news come in on the unemployment front.

So we’ve already gone down unemployment at 27.2%, I mean, where do you think it is going to go later this year?

Well, the summer is better for employment. Because of you and also the Holy Week’s out there as Easter because that increases employment notorious industry, so we might not have such a big increase immediately, but I think there will be more unemployment, especially worrying if the unemployment is young because there are something like 56-57% of the young in unemployed and they have been, many of them have been unemployed since they left school.