Spain’s regions and Madrid slide into game of ‘chicken’ over coronavirus

Addressing the nation for the first time since Spain’s summer spike in coronavirus cases, prime minister Pedro Sánchez made clear whom he considered most responsible: not him.

During the gruelling months of spring, Sánchez’s Socialist-led administration invoked emergency powers to maintain lockdown, override regional governments and force down infection rates. The political cost was high. This time round, the prime minister insists, more of the burden should fall on Spain’s decentralised system of government.

"It is the regions that have the capacity to manage the health emergency," he said last week, as the spread of the virus far outpaced everywhere else in Europe. His opponents accuse him of washing his hands of the crisis.

Sánchez argues it is up to individual regions to ask the central government to grant them emergency powers if needed for specific areas. Regional politicians – reluctant to acknowledge particular problems on their watch – say a national response is required.

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"The central government cannot be absent," said Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the centre-right leader of the government of Madrid. "Abandoning its functions will expand the pandemic."

As the handling of the crisis threatens to become a game of “chicken” between the centre and regions, with each calling on the other to act, one big question is whether Spain’s decentralised model puts the country at a disadvantage.

The number of cases over the past 14 days has reached 205 per 100,000 of population, compared with 23 in the UK, 22 in Italy, 85 in France and 21 in Germany. In two districts of Madrid, the level is above 800.

On Friday the country also reported almost 10,000 new cases – more than any daily total in the spring – although officials stress that detection rates are far higher and hospitalisations and fatalities far lower than they were then.

"When you have a structural problem with your institutions you need more – not less – leadership," said Nacho Torreblanca, head of the Madrid office of the European Council on Foreign Relations. "And we have an excessively decentralised system."

Health system

That decentralisation applies particularly to health policy. For almost two decades, the country’s 17 regions have managed healthcare; last year their combined €62 billion budget dwarfed the central government’s expenditures of €6 billion. The national health ministry has only about 500 staff.

The shift in resources began in 1981, with the transfer of health competences to Catalonia. It was completed in 2001, with the last 10 regions, including Madrid, taking over responsibility for dozens of hospitals and tens of thousands of staff.

Although officially the country has a single health system, it is far from unitary. During the worst of the crisis, regions were reluctant to transfer patients and medical staff to relieve pressure elsewhere – although material was shipped across the country, sometimes to regions’ displeasure.

Since then, Spain’s efforts to collect coronavirus data – a key tool in analysing and fighting the pandemic – have been undermined by disparities in how different regions report infections and fatalities, as well as when they issue updates. Sometimes numbers have not added up; on other days data from a given region is entirely lacking.

“Not all the information from the regions is of the same quality,” said a senior health official. “We have mechanisms to minimise the risk that it is not sufficiently homogeneous or comparable but it can generate problems.”

Nor is it straightforward to assess regions’ plans to fight the virus, even though Sánchez’s initial plans to phase out the lockdown were supposed to depend on detailed criteria for individual areas.

More than five months after the crisis began, the health ministry says it is unable to say how many people are working on track-and-trace in the country as a whole – because of differences in definitions used by the regions. But the health official acknowledged that Madrid’s roughly 560 trackers were unlikely to be enough, given the rates of infection in the region, which has recorded more than 27,000 cases over the past two weeks. Sánchez is providing the services of 2,000 military officials to help the regions with their tracking efforts.

Emergency powers

The prime minister’s office adds that there is “constant dialogue” with the regions, noting that Sánchez broke new ground by holding regular teleconferences with regional leaders throughout the lockdown.

Last week, national and regional health and education officials agreed some protocols for the reopening of schools next month – such as requirements for children over six to wear masks – although there will be different class sizes across the country.

Sánchez will also meet his main political opponents this week, with “depoliticising the fight against the pandemic” on the agenda. But, despite previous promises, he has been reluctant to follow calls by the centre-right People’s Party to update health legislation as a less dramatic alternative to using emergency powers. Officials say such a reform could take months.

The deep level of polarisation in Spanish politics has also made the relationship between centre and regions particularly fraught.

The animosity between Sánchez’s government and the PP leadership of Madrid is all too clear. Tensions with the pro-independence administration of Catalonia remain a constant of the country’s politics. During the lockdown, regional nationalists and PP politicians alike chafed at the central government’s control. Ayuso even went to court to exit the lockdown quicker.

“The regions had the same complaint – whether they were Catalonia, the Basque country, or Madrid - that the government had taken away their competences,” said an experienced Socialist figure. “That’s the difference we have with real federal systems like Germany and the US; things aren’t as well defined here and that creates a real problem.” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2020