Politics & Power Quote by Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero

Progress, Zapatero implies, is not a gift delivered by GDP graphs or “modernization” plans; it’s the consequence of power being redistributed downward. The phrase “citizens counting for more” is doing the heavy lifting. It doesn’t just mean being counted in a census or courted on election day. It suggests political weight: the ability to shape institutions, constrain elites, and demand services as a matter of entitlement rather than favor. By pairing that with “having more rights,” Zapatero frames rights not as ornamental ideals but as economic infrastructure. Rights become the precondition for durable growth because they stabilize expectations, widen participation, and reduce the kinds of arbitrary treatment that makes societies feel like rigged casinos.

The subtext is a quiet rebuke to a common political shortcut: treating economic progress as something that can be engineered while democracy and civil liberties are postponed for later. In Zapatero’s world, “later” is a trap. Social and cultural progress aren’t side effects of prosperity; they’re co-products of citizenship that actually has teeth.

Context matters: Zapatero is a center-left Spanish leader associated with rights-expanding reforms in the 2000s, speaking in a European tradition where the welfare state and civil liberties are often sold as mutually reinforcing. The line also doubles as a defense against austerity-era narratives that reduce citizens to “taxpayers” and nations to balance sheets. He’s arguing that the fastest route to national strength runs through the slow work of enlarging who belongs, and what they’re allowed to claim.