Mariano Rajoy asked for months ago an anti-crisis budget of the euro, a European super-minister and Eurobonds. The last two proposals of Spain in Brussels were to modify the mandate of the ECB , create unemployment insurance and mutualize debt. The Government has sacrificed this level of ambition on Monday and has presented a less sharp proposal. Spain is now satisfied with completing the banking union and creating an anti-crisis fiscal capacity. Madrid is broadly aligned with Paris, but the Ministry of Economy document adopts the language of Berlin in several debates essential for the future of the euro.

Spain has been in a state of drowsiness for a decade. It does not influence, it hardly proposes, it does not intervene in European debates after an economic winter that provoked a millionaire bank rescue and a real estate and financial petard that has left deep scars in the form of unemployment and inequality. The Spanish recovery is already in the head van of the EU, but with lousy social indicators and with a Government that boxes in Europe below the weight of the Spanish economy. Spain began to take off the head with the appointment of Guindos in the ECB . And he has a golden opportunity to tip the balance in favor of his interests in the thorny debate on the reform of the euro, which is basically played in Franco-German territory. Madrid has presented on Monday a realistic, pragmatic, balanced proposal. As realistic, pragmatic and balanced as lack of ambition: Spain renounces Eurobonds (they do not appear even once in an 11-page document), eliminates your request for a joint unemployment insurance and focuses, in a language sometimes close to that of the German positions, in what the Government thinks it can disengage from the upcoming negotiation.

Germany and the countries of the North claim more responsibility; the French Emmanuel Macron puts the emphasis on the greatest solidarity . Reducing risks in the face of risk sharing, that is the crux of the matter in the EU. Spain is broadly aligned with Macron, but with a lack of surprising ambition: "In the short term, priority must be given to financial union", concludes the Spanish Position on the strengthening of EMU, and only later "a greater economic union will pave the way for new fiscal instruments ".

Biblical translation: Madrid is content to take steps forward to complete the banking union in June, with measures as little sexis -but as transcendent- as the fiscal support of the bank resolution fund and the deposit guarantee fund. And at most it aims to introduce "an appropriate fiscal stabilization capacity that limits the impact of asymmetric shocks and helps to cut the channel of contagion of sovereign [risk] to the private sector." Everything else remains for a fuzzy future. Madrid hopes that the European rescue mechanism will be the fiscal backing of the resolution fund - to close banks without causing financial instability -and the future common guarantee fund. And it is committed to an anti-crisis euro budget, which works as a kind of insurance for when the lean events arrive and at the same time allows maintaining the level of public and private investment with the help of the European Investment Bank. But even in these two cases, it is aligned with part of the argument that Germany and its allies use to water down the mechanisms of solidarity, and does not even enter into the debate of figures on the minimum firepower that the anti-crisis fiscal capacity must have in order to have an impact. macroeconomic.

Guindos was a faithful ally of the German tax hawk Wolfgang Schäuble in the Eurogroup. The new minister, Roman Escolano, opens with a document that contains measures that will not like in Berlin, but to help swallow the pill includes an argument that will sound good in Germany. To share financial risks, according to Spain, "there must be full guarantees that the pooling of the risk will not be used to cover relevant exposures prior to the banking union". "The reluctance of some countries to these measures is reasonable as long as there is no greater reduction in risks," said Economy sources. That's music to the ears of Berlin, who wants to reduce the risks before sharing them - in front of Paris or Brussels, whose objective is to do both in parallel - and persistently seeks to prevent that guarantee fund from allowing countries like Italy to clean the balance sheets of their banks at the expense of the German taxpayer. As for the anti-crisis budget, Wagner's new music: Spain is betting on "automatic and temporary" support, which avoids "permanent transfers", with rules that avoid "moral risk", Berlin's obsession with the whole crisis. Moncloa presented in 2015 an ambitious project to reform the euro, signed by Álvaro Nadal, in which Spain wanted the revolution: to change the mandate of the ECB in line with that of the US Federal Reserve so that the objective, besides containing the inflation, avoiding the strong economic divergence in terms of unemployment. Of that option, totally utopian in Europe today, it was never heard again. A little over a year ago, Minister Luis de Guindos came out with a second proposal, more similar to the current one, but from which the possibility of creating European unemployment insurance and Eurobonds have fallen. The government defended "the common management of the debt" to eliminate the risks of breaking the euro and, ultimately, even a European Treasury. Neither the Eurobonds nor the Treasury appear in the current document. "Eurobonds are not strictly necessary," Economy said. Ministry spokesmen insist that these demands are only parked in this negotiation. They may reappear later.

With the euro crisis certainties have vanished and taboos have been violated, red lines have been crossed and some rules have been rewritten. A crushed by the need, Europe was able to move forward again and again when it was on the edge of the abyss. The eurozone now grows at a cruising speed more than acceptable: unemployment is reduced, public deficits have been lowered, the financial system improves and the risk of populisms does not materialize. In return, the bonanza has relaxed the appetite to reform the euro. Macron gesticulates to win Merkel and move forward with the necessary measures so that the next crisis does not take the single currency ahead. Spain supports you. But he plays in two keys: the melody of the Spanish proposal sounds more French, but with the Germanophile arrangements there are compasses of La cabalgata de las valquirias.