REUTERS

BARCELONA STUDENTS are protesting on Barcelona’s elegant boulevards, public-sector wages are being cut for the second time in three years and resentment is growing against the central government and beneficiaries of bank bailouts.

Such is the daily fallout from the euro zone’s debt crisis. Like the rest of Spain, Barcelona is looking at several years of hard grind as the country adjusts to living within its means after the collapse of a debt-financed housing bubble that has brought much of the banking sector to its knees.

Yet unless the most pessimistic projections of the cost of rescuing the banks prove right, the signs are that Spain faces corrosion not collapse.

Greece risks suddenly not being able to pay for vital imports if it cannot form a new government that sticks to the terms of an international bailout.

But Spain is more representative of the generally insidious, demoralising nature of the crisis: austerity is sapping trust in politicians across the euro zone and fraying the social fabric as the bills for years of economic mismanagement are shared out.

“The problem is social.

What are we going to do when we have 25 percent unemployment? It’s dramatic,” said Joan Ramon Rovira, head of economic studies at the Barcelona chamber of commerce.

Even though every fourth Spaniard is unemployed, job protection is being eroded. In Barcelona, capital of the northeastern region of Catalonia, hospital wards are being closed, class sizes are growing and university fees are rising.

The result is a hardening of attitudes as various groups campaign to preserve their entitlements.

The crisis has also ratcheted up political tensions with Madrid as supporters of Catalan independence increasingly begrudge helping to bankroll the central government, which they feel treats them with disdain.

“Spain is a backpack that is too heavy for us to keep carrying. It’s costing us our development,” said the spokesman for Catalan President Artur Mas, Joan Maria Pique.

Rovira is optimistic that Spain will pull through. He produces figures showing how smartly exports are rising from Catalonia, which makes up 20 percent of the national economy and generates about 30 percent of its exports.