Horror in Spain turns to anger against prime minister

Bloomberg

Every night at 8 pm, Spaniards head to their balconies and windows to clap for the healthcare workers risking their lives to save others from the coronavirus pandemic. An hour later, there’s a second wave of noise in some neighbourhoods as people come out with pots and pans.
This time it’s not in praise, but in protest at the government’s handling of the deadliest emergency to hit Spain since the Franco dictatorship years.
The public health crisis that’s seen hospitals overwhelmed, medical staff dying on the front line and harrowing stories of the army finding corpses in nursing homes, risks morphing into a political one for PM Pedro Sanchez.
After a series of missteps, his administration is increasingly being blamed for failing to get a grip on the disease. Fatalities reached 15,238 on Thursday, the most in the world per capita, and infections climbed to more than 150,000. Parliament was expected to vote on Thursday on extending a national lockdown through April 25.
“This has been appalling from the start,” said Javier Dueñas, 59, a builder who lives in the Retiro neighbourhood of Madrid who just joined the protests against the government. “They should pay a price for all of this.”
Just 28% of Spaniards approve of the efforts by their government to deal with the outbreak, compared with 35% three weeks ago, according to a GAD3 poll published by Spanish newspaper ABC.
In contrast, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte have more than 60% backing from voters in recent surveys. French President Emmanuel Macron’s overall approval rating jumped to its highest level in nearly two years.
In extreme, extraordinary situations, “most countries tend to have a ‘rally behind the flag’ moment” that boosts the country’s leader, said Narciso Michavila, chairman of GAD3. But that hasn’t happened in Spain, largely because of the fiery ideological divisions that have dominated its politics since the Civil War in the 1930s, he said.
A month ago, when deaths were already mounting across the Mediterranean in Italy, Sanchez showed support for an International Women’s Day on March 8. Less than a week later, he declared a state of emergency. Now citizens are confined to their homes, and Spain is gripped by Europe’s most-extensive outbreak of Covid-19.
The way Spain is run hasn’t worked in Sanchez’s favour. Keeping a country with different languages and administrations together has never been easy, and the crisis has exposed a weakness in the Spanish federal system.
When it comes to healthcare and nursing homes, the central government normally has no direct oversight of the 17 regions. But under the state of emergency announced on March 14, Sanchez changed that, placing them all under the control of the health minister. The government then scrambled to run a sprawling system it had no control over for years.
Sanchez has held periodic calls with the regional presidents, though failed to create
a solid, united political front,
and many regional governments have complained of shortages of medical equipment.