After former Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero met with Joe Biden in 2010, two words stuck with him: tears and suffering.

That’s according to Zapatero’s 2013 memoir, The Dilemma. The two met at the Prime Minister’s residence on the outskirts of Madrid. The meeting was intended as a show of gratitude from the United States about Spain’s involvement in Afghanistan. But the conversation quickly turned to the eurozone, as several countries dealt with the extended fallout of the global financial crisis. “In giving his opinion on the markets,” Zapatero wrote of Biden, “he told me, with a harshness that until then I had not heard, that the only way to gain their trust was by making decisions that made you suffer truly and thoroughly. That you are only credible in certain circumstances if you subject citizens to difficult tests, if the unions openly reject your policy, in short, if there are tears and suffering. I was struck by his message, for its frankness and its toughness. Tears and suffering.”

Zapatero—who ruled with Spain’s center-left Socialist Workers Party, or PSOE—would become the face of that country’s punishing austerity cutbacks, enacted under mounting pressure from the International Monetary Fund and European Commission. The meeting with Biden, as recalled by Zapatero, occurred just days before the Spanish prime minister announced he would cut civil service pay by 5 percent, enact a hiring freeze, slash public sector investment by six billion euros, and freeze pension payments. Obama—who himself pivoted from stimulus to deficit-cutting that year, urging European partners to do the same—encouraged Zapatero to take such “resolute action.”

Now in power again a decade later, Spain’s PSOE has moved left in recent years and rejected austerity; American Democrats, out of power, mostly haven’t, though there are certainly plenty of people trying to make that happen. With big, universal programs as popular as ever among Democratic voters, some of the party leaders’ lingering commitment to so-called fiscal responsibility could mean wasting a crisis in which Democrats could, in theory, do better than they have in years.

As the coronavirus spread and its economic fallout worsened, Democrats, it’s worth noting, were miles ahead of the GOP on the need for a spending package worth hundreds of billions of dollars, calling for that even as the White House continued to pass the coronavirus off as a hoax they’d already contained. But while they were quick to realize the severity of the situation, and while their responses have been on the whole more egalitarian, there’s plenty to be desired about how the party’s elder statesmen have navigated this moment. What should be a pretty easy situation for them to find an electoral silver lining in has been anything but.