2023-12-26 20:02:54
The PSOE and Sumar negotiated this Tuesday against the clock, and amid disagreements, the scope of the extension of the ‘social shield’ originally designed to combat the effects of inflation and the crisis aggravated by the war in Ukraine. The text will be approved this Wednesday in the last Council of Ministers of the year. The socialists have been warning for days that the time has come to withdraw stimuli from the economy and argue that it is the European Union itself that is pointing in that direction. The minority partner demands greater “ambition.” But the one who has already won a medal is EH-Bildu.
Pedro Sánchez has made it clear with his public statements, as well as with his actions, that he is determined to complete in this legislature the accelerated normalization of the nationalist left and that allows Arnaldo Otegi’s party, electorally increasingly stronger, to compete with the PNV in influence on the decisions of the central Executive. The latest achievement that he already boasts is the continuity until 2025 of the prohibition on evicting vulnerable families without a housing alternative that will be included in the aforementioned anti-crisis decree.
The measure was announced by the Basque independence group while the departments led by María Jesús Montero, fourth vice president, Minister of Finance and deputy general secretary of the PSOE, and Yolanda Díaz, first vice president, Minister of Labor and leader of Sumar, still maintained a tug-of-war. loosens over issues such as to whom free public transportation should be extended or whether extraordinary taxes on banks and electricity companies should be modified.
Sánchez announced in the investiture debate that mobility aid would be maintained only for young people and children and for unemployed people, but the minority partner of the Executive is in favor of it being, as until now, universal. It also intends that the levies on financial entities and energy companies – approved a year ago outside the ‘social shield’ – remain as they are, despite the fact that the president has already sent signals that he sees it as preferable to lower them to boost investment and credit.
It is not, in any case, the first time that Bildu can claim some of the Government’s social measures as its own. In 2022 he achieved a 15% increase in non-contributory pensions as a counterpart to his decision not to block the bill to promote public pension plans. Also noted was the extension of the 2% cap for rent updates, later included in the housing law (which set 3% for next year). It is, in fact, their strategy of prioritizing social issues over identity issues at this time that has been smoothing their relationship with the socialists, who on Thursday will propel them to the Mayor’s Office of Pamplona with a motion of censure against the mayor of UPN, Cristina Ibarrola.
The PSOE insists, even so, that in the Basque Country its preferential relationship continues to be with the PNV, which – with its sights also set on the elections scheduled for the first half of 2024 – this Tuesday made its move, but in a different way and with another orientation. The nationalists registered a bill in Congress that urges the Government to allow the autonomous communities to directly award the regional Strategic Projects for Recovery and Economic Transformation (PERTE). “There is an obvious risk that funds will remain unexecuted if the governance formula does not change,” they noted.
«Stimulate coexistence»
The socialists are obliged to pamper both parties equally because both are equally necessary for governability, the same as the Catalan independence forces, Junts and ERC. The PP has made this dependency and the concessions made by Sánchez to achieve the investiture, among them, the amnesty law, its main opposition weapon, and on Monday it thought it saw in the speech given by the King on Christmas Eve an endorsement that The PSOE, on the other hand, denies.
The spokesperson for the socialists in the Senate, Juan Espadas, argued in an interview on RNE that it is a “political mistake” to want to “appropriate” the monarch’s words and assured that his party feels represented in the message that there is no democracy. nor coexistence outside the Constitution, that it is necessary to maintain respect between institutions and that it is the moral duty of everyone to prevent discord from establishing itself among Spaniards. “I think it has the objective of calming spirits, stimulating coexistence and avoiding polarization and radicalism in some of the debates,” he defended.
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