2023-05-16 09:34:28
Unidas Podemos wants to extend to the rest of the political parties the system with which it finances its electoral campaigns and for this it will register this Tuesday a bill that contemplates expressly prohibiting the forces from being financed in these periods through bank loans . The objective, say sources from the parliamentary group, is to avoid the “interference” of that sector in the “electoral procedures.”
The bill that the group will send this Tuesday to the Congress of Deputies provides that the parties finance their electoral campaigns through their own resources, with contributions from their militancy or through donation campaigns or interest-free microcredits. In exchange, Unidas Podemos proposes to offset the impact of the eventual decrease in income through this route with an increase in the percentage of advance of the subsidies that these formations can receive, so that it goes from the current 30% to 50%.
The formations that make up Unidas Podemos have criticized in recent days the influence that the banking sector has thanks to this channel in the programmatic proposals of the rest of the parties. Podemos, for example, recently associated this bank financing in a campaign on social networks with the fact that only they have proposed creating a public bank or putting a cap on variable mortgage installments in the face of rising interest rates. “Whoever pays rules and that is why Podemos is financed by the people,” they wrote.
Whoever pays rules, and that is why Podemos is financed by the people.
Our pulse will never tremble to tell those who have the most that endless lining at the expense of the Spanish men and women is over. pic.twitter.com/JD8INYQimv
— We can (@WE CAN) May 12, 2023
“The banking sector in Spain has enormous political and media power that severely limits the democratic development of the country,” says Unidas Podemos in the bill that this newspaper has had access to. “Spain is one of the countries, not only in the EU but also in the OECD, where public banking is less developed. The power of our country’s financial sector explains its enormous influence on key debates for the development of public policies that benefit the social majorities”, argues the group in the text, which attributes to the influence of the banking sector in politics that measures such as the regulation of dation in payment in mortgage loans, the limitation of abusive interest rates, the regulation of the real estate market, the brake on the outsourcing of public services or the recovery of public money lost in the bank bailouts.
To establish this prohibition, the bill proposes the inclusion of two new points in article 128 of the electoral regime law (LOREG): 2) “The contribution to these electoral accounts of funds from any credit institution is also prohibited , banks, savings banks, credit cooperatives or the Official Credit Institute”. 3) “The contribution to these electoral accounts of funds derived from loans from natural and legal persons is also prohibited, provided that these are for consideration, and a consideration or interest has been agreed. This prohibition will not affect free loans”. Likewise, it proposes withdrawing from the electoral expenses section of the parties the “interest on the credits received for the electoral campaign, accrued up to the date of receipt of the corresponding subsidy.”
End to the mass mailing of electoral propaganda
The United We Can proposal also includes a section to eliminate the massive mailing of ballots and electoral propaganda to homes. The confederal group points out the “extremely high cost” that this subsidy entails for the public coffers of the State, since it is not affected by the generic campaign spending limits and points out that it has skyrocketed “in the last decade”, “equaling or, even in the case of some political formations, exceeding the amount of the general electoral subsidy.”
What Unidas Podemos proposes in return is that the Administration make a single shipment with all the candidacies presented and proclaimed, although it limits this proposal to general, regional and European elections, due to the “enormous difficulties” that they argue would entail for the Administration “the timely submission of ballots for the infinity of candidacies that are presented”, and also due to “the lower public funding that the political formations that are presenting themselves in these elections have”.
The text of the confederal group points to the data of a recent report from the Court of Auditors in this regard, which documents that in the last general elections “150,013,844 electoral mailings were subsidized for a total amount of 25,313,719”, a higher amount for the first time “to the sum of the rest of the subsidies for the electoral campaign to all the political formations”, which amounted to 23,621,353.08 euros.
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