Four years ago, in the United Kingdom, nearly 20,000 people followed live the crazy challenge of a British media outlet titled “Can Liz Truss survive this lettuce?” They compared the political life of the then prime minister to how quickly an iceberg cap degrades outside the refrigerator. The Tory leader had put the country on the ropes with a very unbalanced budget plan that proposed the biggest tax cut in half a century. As we found out later, lettuce won.
Currently other leaders are experiencing similar Truss moments. Lula da Silva felt the fierceness of the markets after turning around the electoral forecasts in Brazil; In Japan, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi has been on the tightrope for some time due to the depreciation of the yen and this week we learned that AI values on the stock market have not been doing well at all with the Democratic wave that triumphed in the US.
In Spain, the macroeconomic situation that the next Executive will inherit, regardless of his color, is relatively comfortable, which a priori will remove market pressures. However, experts believe there is a long list of tasks to address. Some are urgent (such as the measures to be taken with a CPI approaching 5%); others are important (such as the problem of access to housing). Many stem from chronic pain in the economy, such as the aging of the population and its reflection in social benefits and services or the lack of maintenance of infrastructure. Others, more temporary, such as the end of the Next Generation recovery funds, will represent an unprecedented brake on investment. And all of them, especially the increase in productivity, will force us to adopt courageous measures that in many cases will have to have the support of a large majority of the parliamentary body and even the complicity of other administrations.
In the short term, the next tenant of La Moncloa can be relatively calm. Since 2022, the country has grown more than the EU—on average, 3.7% compared to 1.7% for the eurozone as a whole—and continues to be the locomotive of the continent fueled by the entry of immigrants. Thanks to this, between 2023, the date of the last elections, and 2025, public finances have improved. The debt was reduced by five points to reach 100.7% of GDP and Funcas estimates that this year it will foreseeably decrease to 98%. The unemployment rate is around 10% and there are more people working than ever, 22.8 million. Household and business debt fell last year to 42.8% and 62.6% of GDP respectively, registering a 25-year low, according to the Bank of Spain.
For now, the savings cushion generated in the pandemic and job creation continue to support consumption, although the acceleration in prices squeezes the real income of families. And that's where the bad news begins. The entrenchment of the conflict in the Strait of Hormuz and other threats, such as the one strangling maritime traffic in the Strait of Bab el-Mandeb, are keeping energy prices high. Low refining capacity in Europe may continue to raise company costs, fueling new inflation. The CPI advances 4.9% and the Bank of Spain has warned that upward fluctuations will persist, which could put a damper on the wheels of growth. In this context there is a red flag: the price differential with the EU has widened, leading Raymond Torres, director of Economics at Funcas, to warn that competitiveness is being eroded. Indicators of severe deficiency give other gloomy signals. They suggest that the good performance of the economy “has barely reduced the relative weight of the population with the greatest deprivation in Spain, the one that experiences the most economic difficulties in their lives,” especially in families with children under 16 years of age. And although unemployment is at a minimum, the country, together with Finland, has the highest rate in the entire OECD and historically shows its inability to drop from levels of 10%.
In short, the next Government will have to face a horizon in which two things will foreseeably happen: high inflation will remain and there will be a gradual cooling of employment and growth.
Household financial conditions may also worsen due to the persistence of relatively high interest rates. The Euribor, the reference index for variable mortgages, closed in October at 3.2% and remains at highs in more than two years. The same can happen with State financing, which now enjoys good conditions compared to those of its neighbors. The risk premium, which in the worst years of the Great Recession reached 640 basis points with respect to the German bond, is now around 60. The Italian one is at 112 and that of France, at 145. However, the fiscal margin is narrowing rapidly. In long-term maturities, so far this year the Spanish bond yield has increased almost one point, a worrying sign for economists.
Through the opinion of a dozen experts and representatives of organizations (the CEOE employers' association refused to participate), we summarize below the main challenges to be addressed. We cannot know what response they will have from the parties because the majority have not yet published their electoral program. In any case, it is worth remembering that Liz Truss resigned after only 45 days in office, leaving a clear lesson to other politicians: in addition to getting power, you have to know what to do with it.
Housing
The general strike called for November 11 by the Confederation of Tenants' Unions with the support of the main unions is the result of the price fever that the housing market has been suffering for years. The CIS survey published in October with interviews carried out before the eviction of Maricarmen Abascal reflects that 80% of citizens are quite or very concerned about the situation and 76% believe that the State should intervene to guarantee the constitutional right of access.
The Bank of Spain, recalls Pablo Tucat, an expert at Ksnet, a company dedicated to the evaluation of public policies, projected in its 2025 annual report that 750,000 houses are missing, a figure that could rise by another 300,000 until 2028. Supply does not keep pace with demand and this is especially dramatic in provinces such as Madrid, Barcelona, Alicante, Valencia, Murcia and Malaga.
The most widespread diagnosis refers to a lack of housing that compensates for the growth of households, especially in a handful of highly demanded cities. “Many things need to be done for a long time,” Carlos Gutiérrez summarizes from the CC OO studies service. That long term, he believes, is what has been neglected in the past because there have not been sustained policies in the same direction. Among them, a figure that urgently increases public housing.
For Raymond Torres, the central thing is in the political consensus: "Some propose pure and simple construction as a solution; others are inclined towards more social housing, or a cap on rents... In the past there was an additional aggravating factor. Any measure that involved spending more public money or a response from the private sector was a problem, because there was no room for maneuver. Now we don't have that debate, but there is a lack of consensus." Manuel Muñiz, rector of IE University, connects it with the cost of living and calls for a policy of combined measures to facilitate construction: "It is clear that we have an enormous challenge. Although the supply deficit is not the only thing, we must resolve it. There are a lot of proposals on the table: land liberalization, facilitation of procedures, increasing public housing (VPO), promoting agreements between administrations...".
Paloma Villanueva, professor at the Complutense University, believes that in the short term a convincing response must be given and, at the same time, work throughout the legislature, because “it is not only a problem for the young population.” For example, as Tucat suggests, using the Urban Leases Law and forcing protected housing to be of permanent qualification. “The current VPO stock does not reach 2% when in Europe it is around 8% and this gap is explained because social housing has been disqualified.”
Javier Soria, postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University, adds another novel approach as a result of his research. Tax policy has favored donations from parents to children. They reached a record 225,300 last year, 13% more than in 2024. Children of families in the top 10 of parental income are those who receive gifts more often and of a larger size with little or no gift tax paid. “Faced with a housing stock that is not expanding, it is the children of the richest 10% who mainly benefit from this increase in donations, making it even easier to access a first home,” he explains. That exacerbates the wealth inequality gap. It also talks about the need to give up land to, in collaboration with private developers, develop public housing, but not in any way. "We need to avoid models like that of Paris, where all social housing is built outside the city, generating entire low-income neighborhoods. We must create mixed neighborhoods with the perspective of reducing segregation."
Villanueva extends it to the tenure regime: the distance between the incomes of households that rent versus households that own property has a negative effect. "And in the productive sphere we have capital, national and foreign, that are attracted by those high rental returns, which is still an unproductive activity. It is simply an extraction of income." At the heart of its recommendations lies an idea that will require a profound change in mentality to favor housing for living, not for investing, teaching the population the way to channel their savings towards the productive economy with fiscal measures.
Productivity and innovation
It may be the most difficult and long-term challenge. Increasing productivity is an element that experts describe as nuclear to guarantee solid growth in a world full of threats. Improving productivity has to do with increasing the size of the business fabric, investing in innovation and digitalization (including artificial intelligence), better qualifying workers and eliminating regulatory problems and regulatory fragmentation.
The debate on the matter touches on another important point: the current Government's open-door immigration policy. Isaac Baley, professor at Pompeu Fabra and the Barcelona School of Economics, reviews it looking back: "If we look at the growth of GDP per worker, productivity has not grown in the last 10 years. Each worker is not being more productive. The economy is doing very well in integrating new workers, but it is extensive growth, it does not mean that it is being more efficient. That causes salaries to stagnate." Carmen Herrero, from the University of Alicante, is alarmed by the problem of low salaries linked to inflation: "We are subsidizing higher education but at the same time we are losing the best, replacing well-trained young people with poorly trained young people. Companies are very short-sighted, because with these salaries workers cannot have a life project."
The partner of the consulting firm EY Juan Pablo Riesgo, who was Secretary of State for Employment between 2015 and 2018, believes that the limits of a growth model based solely on foreign employment are being seen: "We have been creating between 500,000 and 600,000 jobs. 80% of the growth of the economy, according to the ECB, derives from immigration. But that has a limit. To make it more sustainable, it is urgent to boost productivity." How is it possible that, with all this dynamism, unemployment is not able to drop below 10%? “Priority use continues to be made of foreign talent over activation strategies for the unemployed or inactive,” he considers. The activity rate of the foreign population is ten points higher (69%) than that collected by the EPA taking into account the entire population. "There has not been much progress in active employment policies. With the technology available today, I am surprised that we do not have an app with a profile of who we are and what dedication we would like to have, with a training itinerary to get that job," says Riesgo.
Although there is division of opinion. Paloma Villanueva does consider that a structural change has occurred since the pandemic. "The economy grows not only in the extensive framework, but because there are increases in productivity. It is true that they are slight, but all of this contributes to the fact that we are finally facing procyclical, and not countercyclical, productivity behavior, as we have had until now." The data supports his argument: the IVIE and BBVA productivity observatory estimated the growth of this figure at the year-on-year rate at 0.9% at the beginning of the year. Between 2022 and 2025, annual productivity per hour worked grew by 0.7% while remaining stagnant in the euro zone.
Whether modest or almost negligible, delving into the progress is essential. Sergio Rodríguez, president of the I+E Foundation, which brings together multinationals such as Pfizer, HP or ArcelorMittal, speaks of shortcomings in investment in innovation: "Public investment must be a driver, but we also fail in private investment. In 2025, although it has increased, it has amounted to 1.52% of GDP when the commitment is 3%. That does bring wealth to a country." Calls for institutional, regulatory and legal stability. And a fiscal policy “that encourages investment.”
Immigration
It is the second problem that worries citizens the most, according to the CIS, and, perhaps, the most politicized phenomenon. The migratory push, in an economic sense, has a positive impact, something recognized in abundant studies. But the arrivals system is perverse: it generates large pockets of irregulars who can only escape from the underground economy through periodic extraordinary procedures. This means that many people have difficulty – or cannot at all – sign a rental contract, issue an invoice or get a job. Patricia Gabaldón, from the IE, calls it a political problem. "There is a social rejection of regularizations, but we need them. We must find a way so that the immigrant can work from the first day, so that he is not in an informal situation for too long." Villanueva points out that, in addition, the country is receiving highly qualified immigration in occupation
