According to trackaah.com, Spain is an ethnically very homogeneous country in which there are nonetheless instances of independence from some historical regions (in particular the Basque Country and Catalonia) which are distinguished for linguistic and cultural reasons. Spain is also a relatively sparsely populated country when compared with the large states of Western Europe, with a density of almost 93 residents per square kilometer (comparable to that of Greece, while Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom exceed all 200 residents per kilometer. square).
It is a country with a strong Catholic tradition: it was only at the end of Francoism that the 1978 Constitution abolished Catholicism as the state religion. In recent decades, people who declare themselves Catholic have dropped from 90% in the 1980s to 73% in October 2010, while more than a fifth of Spaniards say they do not belong to any religious denomination. Among Catholics, 55% admit that they never attend a religious service.
Between 2000 and 2008 the population increased by more than 5 million people (13%), mainly due to immigration from abroad. In 2014 Spain was the fourth European country for resident foreigners (4.6 million people), behind Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom. The high migratory flows have significantly increased the Muslim population, even if it is only 2% of the total. In recent months the issue of immigration has created a wide debate and has seen the government first oppose the E u planfor refugee quotas, then change your mind and accept the redistribution mechanism for asylum seekers. Spain, since 2010, has managed to contain the phenomenon of illegal immigration, mainly thanks to cooperation with neighboring African countries in terms of police and coastal patrols. Thanks also to these measures, the 2015 wave of migrants did not involve the country, which therefore proved reluctant to commit to a European response to the emergency.
Immigration has contributed to lowering the median age of a relatively elderly population, which in the 1990s was going through a phase of marked demographic decline (in 1998 the fertility rate was 1.16 children per woman, while today it has risen to 1., 32). Foreigners, who represented 12.1% of the Spanish population in 2012 – in the 1990s they were around 1.5% – helped relieve the pension system of some of the pressure caused by the trends. Hispanic demographics. The cost of social security remains a major problem. As happened in other Western realities, the high life expectancy has widened the range of people over 65 (the current retirement age), which in 2012 exceeded 17% of the population. According to United Nations estimates, the trend seems difficult to stop: if the trend remains constant, by 2025 one fifth of the population will be over 65, and by 2050 the share could include one third of the residents.
Spain has been a democratic country since the second half of the 1970s, after about 35 years of authoritarian rule, under Francisco Franco. During the first thirty years of democracy, the rights of civil society progressed at a rapid pace; it has been especially in the last decade, and more precisely since the election of Zapatero in 2004, that Spain has enacted some of the most advanced civil rights laws in Europe. First of all, since 2007 the quotas for women on the electoral lists have been in force: women must make up 50% of the candidates. The consequences were immediately evident: women accounted for 39.7% of the deputies elected to the lower house in 2012. The new legislation on abortion, regulated for the first time by a 1985 law, entered into force in July 2010: provides more possibilities to use it. The law was preceded by a strong protest from the Catholic world, which resulted in street demonstrations in October 2009 in which nearly a million people took part. It is correct to underline that, although abortion was allowed only in certain cases (in the event that the pregnancy was the result of sexual violence, or if the physical or mental health of the mother was in immediate danger, or finally in the case in which the fetus suffered from malformations or mental handicaps), the extensive applications of the law had already expanded the cases of medical abortion from 54,000 in 1998 to 112,000 in 2007.
Same-sex unions are ultimately governed by a law which, which came into force in July 2010, legalized egalitarian marriage. The same law also made adoption by same-sex couples legal. Although the measure was included in the electoral program of the PSOE and enjoyed the consent of about two thirds of public opinion, it also sparked controversy on the part of the leaders of the Catholic Church.
Another divisive measure was the legalization of euthanasia. The provision, also included in the PSOE electoral program, was rejected by the same party in a vote in the courtroom in 2007. The most recent polls show that popular support for the legalization of euthanasia is wide, but in 2008 one scandal linked to some cases of assisted death for at least 400 terminal patients, which involved 15 doctors (later exonerated of all charges), made the start of a new legislative process more complicated.
In terms of education, the strong role of public schools grew until 2002, when the PP approved a reform that strengthened the position of private schools (attended by a third of secondary school pupils) and restricted the possibilities of access to university. In 2005, however, Zapatero’s socialist government reversed much of these changes. The ideological controversy that has arisen about the reform process of the school system has not benefited the quality of education itself, which today reaches the lowest levels among the O ecd countries: the most serious deficiencies are found in reading and mathematics.
