Hugo Dixon

One knee-jerk reaction to Italy’s shock election was to worry about contagion to Spain. As Rome’s bond yields shot up last Tuesday, Madrid’s were dragged up in sympathy. These are the two troubled big beasts of the euro zone periphery and an explosion in either of them could destroy the single currency.

But Spain, where I spent part of last week, probably won’t catch Italian flu. True, the risk of Madrid being thrown off its reform path has risen since Italy’s inconclusive election. But Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy doesn’t have to face the voters for nearly three years. What’s more, the Italian vote may make euro zone policymakers less keen on austerity and so give Spain a better chance of returning to growth.

Indeed, investors have already started having second thoughts. By Friday, Madrid’s 10-year bond yield had fallen back to 5.1 percent from 5.4 percent on Tuesday. The spread between Spanish and Italian yields has shrunk to 0.3 percentage points. There’s even a chance that Madrid could enjoy lower borrowing costs than Rome in the coming weeks if Italy’s political paralysis shows no sign of resolution.

There is, of course, no cause for Schadenfreude in Madrid. The same factors that led to a stunning breakthrough in the Italian elections for the populist Beppe Grillo could eventually play out in Spain, albeit in a different way. Spain’s traditional ruling parties – Rajoy’s centre-right People’s Party and the Socialists – are discredited by a mixture of recession, 26 percent unemployment and corruption allegations. They each enjoy support of around 25 percent in the opinion polls, while the electorate’s trust in politicians has continued to plummet.

Spain doesn’t have a Grillo. But it does have radical left and centrist parties, each with roughly 15 percent support, as well as strong nationalist movements in Catalonia and the Basque Country. Unless there is an economic turnaround, nobody will have a majority in Spain’s next parliament and the country could be hard to govern.

Is Francois Hollande more like Mariano Rajoy or Mario Monti? In other words, is the French socialist president condemned to be always behind the curve with reform like Spain’s conservative prime minister? Or can he get ahead of it like Italy’s technocratic premier?

I put this question to my fellow guests at a dinner in Paris last week. France is not in imminent risk of blowing up, as wrongly implied by the Economist magazine, which used a cover picture of a lighted fuse on baguettes tied together like sticks of dynamite. France is much richer than Spain and its people are more willing to pay their taxes than the Italians. French 10-year borrowing cost is only 2.1 percent, compared to Italy’s 4.9 percent and Spain’s 5.9 percent.

That said, the country has three deep-seated problems which could ultimately cause a mega-crisis: public spending at 56 percent of GDP is way too high; industrial competitiveness has steadily eroded; and the population is in a state of denial. The last cannot be said of either Italians or Spaniards.

The art of politics is about squaring circles. In the euro crisis, this means pushing ahead with painful but necessary reforms while hanging onto power.

In Spain, where I spent part of last week, these circles are getting harder to square. Mariano Rajoy isn’t at any immediate risk of losing power. His 10-month old government has also taken important steps to reform the economy – cleaning up banks, liberalising the labour market and reining in government spending.

But the recession is deepening, the prime minister is a poor communicator and his political capital has plummeted. Madrid will also find it harder than thought to access help from its euro zone partners.

The European Central Bank’s bond-buying scheme has bought Spain and Italy time to stabilise their finances. But if they drag their heels, the market will sniff them out. It will then be almost impossible to come up with another scheme to rescue the euro zone’s two large problem children and, with them, the single currency.

Mario Draghi’s promise in late July to do “whatever it takes” to preserve the euro has already had a dramatic impact on Madrid’s and Rome’s borrowing costs. Ten-year bond yields, which peaked at 7.6 percent and 6.6 percent respectively a few days before the ECB president made his first comments, had collapsed to 5.7 percent and 5.1 percent on Sept. 7.

Most of the decline came before Draghi spelt out last Thursday the details of how the plan will work. What makes the scheme powerful is that the ECB has not set any cap to the amount of sovereign bonds it will buy in the market. The central bank’s financial firepower is theoretically unlimited, whereas the euro zone governments’ own bailout funds do not have enough money to rescue both Spain and Italy.

The euro crisis is to a great extent a confidence crisis. Sure, there are big underlying problems such as excessive debt and lack of competitiveness in the peripheral economies. But these can be addressed and, to some extent, this is happening already. Meanwhile, a quick fix for the confidence crisis is needed.

The harsh medicine of reform is required but is undermining confidence on multiple levels. Businesses, bankers, ordinary citizens and politicians are losing faith in both the immediate economic future and the whole single-currency project. That is creating interconnected vicious spirals.

The twin epicentres of the crisis are Spain and Italy. The boost they received from last month’s euro zone summit has been more than wiped out. Spanish 10-year bond yields equalled their euro-era record of 7.3 percent on July 20; Italy’s had also rebounded to a slightly less terrifying but still worrying 6.2 percent.

Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí. “Upon waking, the dinosaur was still there.”

This extremely short story by Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso sums up the state of play on the euro crisis. Last week’s summit took important steps to stop the immediate panic. But the big economies of Italy and Spain are shrinking and there is no agreed long-term vision for the zone. In other words, the crisis is still there.

The summit’s decisions are not to be sniffed at. The agreement that the euro zone’s bailout fund should, in time, be able to recapitalise banks directly rather than via national governments will help break the so-called doom loop binding troubled lenders and troubled governments. That is a shot in the arm for both Spain and Ireland. Meanwhile, unleashing the bailout fund to stabilise sovereign bond markets could stop Rome’s and Madrid’s bond yields rising to unsustainable levels.

At a dinner in Madrid earlier this month, the main complaint about Mariano Rajoy was that the new prime minister was treating the electorate like children. Many of the guests, supporters of Rajoy’s Popular Party (PP), understood that Spain had to cut its fiscal deficit and restore its competitiveness. But they didn’t like the fact that the prime minister hadn’t been frank about his plans.

In advance of last November’s general election, Rajoy said he wouldn’t raise taxes, make it cheaper to fire people or cut the welfare state. But he has now done the first two. After this week’s election in Andalusia, Spain’s largest region, he is expected to do the last.

Rajoy’s camp doesn’t see any problem in failing to be upfront. It would have been foolish to talk too much about austerity in the general election campaign as that might have frightened the voters. For the same reason, it would be foolish to tell them about reforming the welfare state in advance of the Andalusia election.

When confidence in a regime’s permanence is shaken, it can collapse rapidly. The fear or hope of change alters people’s behavior in ways which make that change more likely. This applies to both political regimes such as Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt and economic regimes such as the euro.

Fear that the single currency may break up now risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Banks and investors are beginning to act as if the single currency might fall apart. Politicians and the European Central Bank need to restore belief that the single currency is here to stay. Otherwise, it could unravel pretty fast.

Until a few weeks ago, the idea that the euro wouldn’t survive the current debt crisis was a fringe view. Since the euro summit on Oct. 26-27, it has become a mainstream scenario. So much so that last week risk premiums on the bonds of even triple-A rated countries such as France and Austria rose to record levels, while Spain became the latest country to be sucked into the danger zone.