Spain: Family Matters

(2 of 3)

Her father, retired Brigadier General José María Sánchez de Toca, 66, says he and his wife tried to instill in their eight children the same family values they'd learned from their own parents. "We taught them to work hard," he says, and also gave them "a sense of austerity. Children should not be given everything they ask for. In my day our parents didn't give in to us." Rigid discipline and corporal punishment were common, he recalls, both at home and at school, and women's roles were largely limited to the family. Though he says his daughters share his traditional values, all five of them work. Sánchez, who has 14 grandchildren, argues that working women miss out on "the best years of their child's life," and that Spanish mothers should be paid to stay home.

Gracia Sánchez doesn't stray far from her father's thinking, but says the changes in Spain since her childhood are "mostly for the better." As a devout Catholic, however, she opposes the Zapatero revolution. "We've gone a step farther than was requested," she says. "Gay marriage and adoption wasn't a response to a demand from the people. It was a way to create a fracture in society; a coup de théâtre, to show how modern and advanced [the Socialists] were." Her husband Enrique Trabado, a lawyer for a major construction firm, provides another rationale for promoting traditional families. "This model forms an economic pyramid," he says. "The current generation must always pay for the pensions of the older generation."

But measured by size alone, the Spanish family has seen better days: until 1996 Spain had the lowest fertility rate in Europe. The rate has actually started to inch back upward, from a low of 1.16 live births per woman in 1996 to 1.38 in 2006. That minor uptick is linked to larger immigrant families, but also to children of Spain's early-1970s baby boom starting to have kids of their own. It's not enough, though, to maintain the population level, so Parliament last year approved a $3,700 "baby bonus" subsidy for each child born.

Pocketbook issues loom large in Spaniards' minds as they prepare to vote amid gathering signs of an economic downturn. Unemployment reached 8.6% in January, the first quarterly rise since 2003. And though most of Zapatero's term was marked by continued economic expansion — begun under his Popular Party predecessor, José María Aznar — up to one-quarter of GDP growth over the past seven years has been linked to housing starts. The resulting housing glut stemmed above all from overconfidence about tourism and speculation on second-home purchases. But José García-Montalvo, an economics professor at Barcelona's Pompeu Fabra University, says basic misconceptions about the rapidly changing Spanish family have exacerbated the problem. Gung-ho developers forged ahead with building projects, in part because government estimates of housing demand made faulty assumptions. A divorced couple, for instance, was automatically calculated as demand for one additional home, though in reality the husband often moves back in with his parents, or two divorcés join each other in a single household. Moreover, young people in Spain tend to live with their parents until they're married, a result of an affordable-housing shortage amid the housing boom. It proved untrue, says García-Montalvo, "that smaller families automatically mean more houses."

Serafin Feraldos, a 25-year-old law student from Valdemoro, wonders if his recent breakup with his Seville girlfriend was due to the fact that he still lived with his mother and father. "I love my parents, I love being taken care of," he says. "But it's hard to have intimacy like this. If you're a young person in Spain, it's difficult to start your own life."

Still, economist García-Montalvo remains optimistic. "There will be problems in the short and medium term, but the economy is more dynamic, with more education, more entrepreneurship, more will to work," he says. "These are good signs for long-term growth."

The link between macroeconomic trends and individual family choices is often hard to quantify. Still, few doubt that widening prosperity was a necessary precondition for Zapatero's momentous changes to Spain's social legislation. In the wake of his surprising 2004 victory — which many attributed to the incumbent Popular Party government's mishandling of the aftermath of the March 11, 2004, Madrid bombings — the little-known Socialist leader made waves with his announcement of an immediate withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq. But the sweeping agenda of progressive social policy is what has truly marked Zapatero's term. He pushed through major women's-rights legislation, including parity in electoral lists, equal-pay provisions, and a comprehensive anti-domestic-violence law in a country still suffering the ill effects of machismo. An "express divorce" law was passed to make ending a marriage quicker and easier. Zapatero also signed a far-reaching amnesty for illegal immigrants and their families.

Most attention, however, has gone to the Zapatero government's expansion of gay rights. Spain had no national provisions for same-sex couples' rights until 2005, when it became only the third country in the world (after the Netherlands and Belgium) to allow gay marriages, and the first to give them full legal status, including adoption rights. After living together for a decade, Maribel Povedano, 39, and Adela Alvarez were married last May in Seville, watched over by scores of family and friends. "All our neighbors completely accept us, even those in their 70s or 80s," says Povedano. But she notes that homosexuals cannot expect that tolerance in smaller towns and rural areas: "In villages, many are forced into living a double life."