Zapatero was pressured to ask troika for bailout

In his memoirs, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero says that on at least three occasions the ECB, IMF and the European Commission asked him to ask for a Spain bailout. His socialist party government flatly denied that this happened, which elEconomista reported on then. Now everyone is discovering that the former Prime Minister was pressured to ask for a bailout, although no other news source has dared to report it.

This is more proof that the executive and media companies were blind when they called our cover story on June 16, 2010 an exaggeration and assured that "the EU and the IMF are creating a bailout plan for Spain worth 250 billion euros." Only two days later, as Zapatero now admits, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was President of the IMF at the time, offered a bailout to Spain.

One year later, on August 5, 2011, former ECB President Jean Claude Trichet sent a letter that listed reforms that the Spanish government should carry out in order to prevent an attack on Spanish public bonds. On July 12 of this year, elEconomista reported that the "the market is once again pushing for a bailout and early elections in Spain."

The seriousness of the situation was obvious then, Spain misjudged and no reforms were implemented until Rajoy became Prime Minister and addressed every point in the letter. Still, neither Rajoy nor Zapatero has recognized that we are living in a state of supervised freedom while complying with one after the other of the troika's requirements.

It is embarrassing that Zapatero tried to justify his management tactics, when his decision to hide the truth exacerbated the crisis for Spain. He put his party before his people even though he denies that as well.