Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy admitted yesterday it would be difficult for the Government to meet its deficit reduction targets despite a raft of austerity measures, as thousands of disabled people staged a noisy protest over cuts to their benefits.

“It is indeed very complicated to reduce the deficit by 2.6 points in a context of recession, with so many problems with revenue and such high financing costs,” Rajoy said in an interview published in La Razon newspaper.

“Spain was asked to make a very difficult effort, to go from 8.9 per cent to 6.3 per cent in only one year,” said Rajoy, who has until now pledged to respect the public deficit target called for by the EU.

“Our goal is to do things well and we will see what will happen at the end of the year,” he said.

Spain, the fourth-largest eurozone economy, is engaged in a deep austerity programme to recover €150 billion between 2012 and 2014, through both tax increases and budget cuts. The task is all the harder as Spain slid back into recession at the end of 2011, fewer than two months after the previous one.

In the latest anti-austerity demonstration in Spain, thousands of disabled people and their families joined a protest in Madrid against budget cuts in the health sector affecting their benefits. The demonstrators, some of them wheelchair-bound, others blind and accompanied by their guide dogs, included Para-lympic athletes. More than four million of Spain’s 47 million people are handicapped, according to disability campaign group CERMI.

“They’ve taken away the right of people who cannot fend for themselves to receive aid and be independent like everyone else, which is a vital right for us,” said one demonstrator, Lola Valverde, 65.

Valverde, who is confined to a wheelchair, said that after having her benefits cut in half this summer, she could now only afford a home help once a week instead of daily, as she had in the past.

Since sweeping to power in the November 2011 election, Rajoy has introduced a series of tough spending cuts and tax hikes to slash the deficit and stabilise Spain’s public finances.

In the health sector alone, his government is trying to make cuts of €7 billion a year, a target that will hit the budgets of regional governments.

Under its draconian austerity drive, the Government broke a key election commitment on Friday when it said it would not raise pensions in line with inflation in 2013.