Pablo Iglesias holds a meeting with representatives of different tenant unions, this Friday in Madrid.JJ Guillén / EFE
Unidos Podemos returns to the fray with its proposal to limit rental prices.
In the middle of the negotiation of the draft of the Budgets, to which party sources acknowledge that he only has “a few fringes”, the formation of Pablo Iglesias has decided to include in the equation an issue that has always generated differences between the Government partners (PSOE and United We Can).
The second vice president has met this Friday with the tenant unions to increase pressure on the Socialists and advance in a legal framework that allows to put a ceiling on the prices of rental housing.
Training sources assure that its implementation would pave the support of other formations for the budget draft, mainly ERC, which seconded a law that limits income and that was approved a month ago in Catalonia.
That rule, the first of its kind to be approved in Spain, was born on the tightrope and at any moment could be appealed by any of the parties that voted against, including the PSC.
The Council of Statutory Guarantees of the Generalitat already indicated at the time the unconstitutionality of some points.
United We can thus rescue one of the flags of the party during all these years at a crucial moment for the future of the coalition.
Everything indicates that next week the draft of the next accounts will be presented - although party sources do not rule out a new delay - and negotiations will begin with the rest of the parties to seek support.
The formation of Pablo Iglesias remains determined to carry out the accounts with the support of the forces that allowed the investiture of Pedro Sánchez in January, that is, without the support of Ciudadanos.
The PSOE, for its part, keeps the door open to the party of Inés Arrimadas, who has already shown on numerous occasions its willingness to reach an agreement.
The Iglesias party is committed to regulating the price of rents to provide legal support to the regulation approved in Catalonia and facilitate the budget agreement with the independence forces.
ERC sources assure that these are different things and that, although they support any advance in terms of rents, its implementation does not imply an automatic yes to the Budgets.
Outside the draft of the Treasury
At the negotiation table of the accounts that the Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero (PSOE), and the Secretary of State for Social Rights, Nacho Álvarez (Podemos) have been holding for weeks, the last agreements on the matter have yet to be closed tax on the tax increases that the draft will include and limit the scope of some social programs.
The limitation of the rental price, included in one of the points of the coalition agreement, would have to be negotiated in parallel, since it is not contemplated that it will go in the draft.
For its part, the Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda, on which state competencies in Housing fall, has maintained since the start of the pandemic the position of waiting for it to pass before acting, with the aim of making a more precise radiography of the situation in which the rents are.
The price limitation is part of the coalition agreement and Minister José Luis Ábalos expressed his intention in February to bring the measure to Congress before the summer.
But the health alarm changed everything.
Among other things, the pandemic forced the presentation of the official rental price index to be delayed until June (it was scheduled for March), the statistic on which the regulation that sets rent caps should be based.
The main source of this statistic is the Tax Agency, which means that the data presented last July corresponded to the declarations presented by taxpayers in 2019. The government's socialist quota defends, therefore, that it does not make much sense to act now with that old photo in a context in which the pandemic has turned the economic situation of the country and many homes upside down.
But from the tenant unions the feeling is precisely that the crisis makes it more "urgent" to act in some way on rents.
“Despite the fact that rents have dropped a little bit, it is necessary for the public administration to help households by moderating prices;
we have been in a critical situation for many months ”, summarizes Jaime Palomera, spokesperson for the Barcelona Tenants Union.
These organizations have been claiming rent caps for years and have participated in the drafting of Catalan law, which they believe that other communities could replicate if the Government promoted a legislative change that would enable them to do so.
To do this, in addition to Iglesias, they met this Friday with various parliamentary forces that supported the investiture and the feelings after those meetings are positive.