Clean hands
The economy is recovering nicely. Cronyism, alas, is rife
IN MAY 2014 Isabel Carrasco was murdered as she walked across a footbridge over the Bernesga river in the north-western Spanish city of León. Ms Carrasco, a controversial local bigwig in the People’s Party (PP) of the prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, was shot at point-blank range by the mother of a young woman whom she had excluded from her political patronage network. (The young woman, the daughter of a local police chief, had been refused a government job.) It was an act of madness, but within the local political context it made a crazy kind of sense. “This was about cronyism, about her daughter’s career,” said Juan Carlos Fernández, a local spokesman for Ciudadanos, a political party that campaigns against corruption.
This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline “Clean hands”
From the December 19th 2015 edition
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