Apologies to those in Spain who are living with fears of a slump and housing crash but it is refreshing to see an election fought over the economy, and almost that alone.

Four years ago, three days after the Madrid train bombings, in one of the most precise messages that elections can send, Spanish voters threw out the conservative Government that had sent troops to Iraq. They brought in José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and his Socialists, who have done little as emphatic as their first move to bring the troops home. What voters care about most now is the torrent of bad news about the economy.

Spain's new focus is a useful warning to the rest of Europe about problems that have been easy to ignore in four years of heated rhetoric about Islamic terrorism, the imperfections of the transatlantic alliance and the frustrations of securing a European constitution.

So far, Zapatero has successfully blamed world markets for rising unemployment and the severe wobbles in Spain's property market. But the winner of the elections could face something much worse.

The easy credit and the house-price boom that have driven 14 years of economic growth, the envy of Europe, have now ended. Voters say they are afraid that the housing market will collapse.

In just over a decade Spanish house prices have tripled and have still doubled after taking account of inflation. Brits looking to swap their expensive property at home for a place in the sun have done their part but so have immigrants from Latin America and North Africa. The Spanish media has been full of analysis, too, of young people leaving the parental home earlier.

To cater for that demand, and also to build the roads and other bounty that has come with EU membership, the construction industry has boomed. It now makes up an astonishing fifth of the economy - or it did, until it stalled. The threat of a sudden slump preoccupies anyone owning Spanish property. Some market analysts talk of prices returning to the levels of the mid-1990s.

It would be no bad thing for the EU itself to think harder about how it is going to manage an era when money is short. Someone is going to have to tell Romania, Bulgaria and other poor members that there is never going to be enough money to turn them into Spain. Rivalled only by the Irish Republic, Spain is the most glittering example of the transformation that membership of the EU brings. But there was more money to give them then - the club was essentially one of rich countries. They had the blessing of courts, legal frameworks and businesses that the former Soviet bloc countries lacked - and they were more prosperous than those countries when they joined.

The prospect of recession makes all kinds of diplomatic problems more difficult (Pakistan, to name just one), even if there are others, such as Iran, where it may give an extra boost to sanctions. The EU's internal wrangling is firmly in the category that will get harder.

For years the EU has been wrestling with its constitution: trying to work out how 27 members should make decisions. It would have done better to spend more time on the substance of what they will have to decide.

The questions of how to share out a pot of money that may be much smaller than many were expecting, and how to react to a slowdown, are top of that list. Spanish voters are right to see that coming.

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