Podemos and other leftist groups redouble pressure on the PSOE for rents

The deputies of United We Can Alberto Rodríguez (in the upper part) and Antón Gómez Reino, on Thursday in Congress.Óscar Cañas / Europa Press

The Government and the PSOE maintain their commitment to bring the General State Budget project for 2022 to the Parliament in two weeks, the one for the reconstruction of the country after the pandemic and the one that could ensure reaching the end of the legislature, but still it is unknown what support it will have.

They do not even have the backing of Unidos Podemos closed, the formation with which they govern and with which they are once again going through a moment of enormous tension.

The pressure on the PSOE is redoubled on several fronts with the aim of lining the government agenda to the left.

The last obstacle, in addition to the taxation of large companies, focuses on the requirement to approve as soon as possible a housing law that regulates and controls the runaway price of rents in certain areas.

More information

• The rent fight: the keys to the proposals of the PSOE and Podemos

Podemos and other groups that usually support the Executive, such as ERC, EH Bildu, Más País, BNG and Nueva Canarias, received on Thursday in Congress a legislative project drawn up by various citizen and social groups related to housing that proposes measures to intervene in the market and that the PSOE has not yet assumed. All those parties, regular allies of the Executive, plus the independentists of the Junts and the CUP, committed to the UGT and CC OO unions, the Anti-Eviction Platform (PAH) and the Madrid Alliance for a Housing Law to jointly register this proposal the next week and take it in due course at least to his parliamentary debate.United We can sources privately admit that this type of position is due to a strategy of pressure on the PSOE to address issues of great social significance among its electorate. But the formation insists on its confidence in reaching an agreement on the Budgets, despite the fact that the positions are “far away”. This was reiterated by the Minister of Social Affairs and Secretary General of Podemos, Ione Belarra, who added: "We have already seen this on other occasions and in the end, United Podemos achieves its objectives.""We have seen this on other occasions and in the end, United We can achieve its objectives.""We have seen this on other occasions and in the end, United We can achieve its objectives."

Relations between government partners are once again going through a difficult time. The Minister of Equality, Irene Montero, in an interview in the SER, also referred to two recent pulses in the Executive, for the minimum wage and the price of electricity, in which the PSOE ended up accepting measures proposed by United We Can " that they did not see so clearly ”. Montero appealed to the commitments of the government pact between the two formations to highlight that now "the step of complying with what has been signed" must be taken.

Government sources of United We can transmit the same firm position and maintain that it is the PSOE who is renouncing the promises of the government program. "It's now or never," these sources commented. "We cannot wait any longer to fulfill our commitments and take progressive measures in favor of the citizenry at once." The training feels reinforced after its leader in the Executive, the second vice president and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, has won the pulse of the first vice president and head of Economy, Nadia Calviño, in raising the minimum wage. And the triumph of the socialist party deciding to put an end to the profits of the electricity companies is also pointed out. In the tug of war with the PSOE,One of the strengths of United We Can is that its positions are backed by key groups in Congress, such as all those who pledged on Thursday with the housing bill.

The government agreement signed in December 2019 by Pedro Sánchez and Pablo Iglesias contained the commitment to regulate the price of rents, the construction of a public housing stock and a state plan for rehabilitation. That pact has not yet been translated into a rule due to substantial differences between the two partners. Before the summer, it seemed that the PSOE and the Ministry of Development, then led by José Luis Ábalos, signed the peace agreement and reached an agreement to reactivate the drafting of that law. Finally, the Socialists gave up regulating rental prices on the terms proposed by their partners. That debate has remained unresolved and United We can once again place it among its priorities for budget negotiation.

The formation has chosen to broaden the focus of its pressure on the PSOE on several fronts, especially in fiscal matters. United We can wield the relevance of printing a progressive veneer in the Budgets and raising the minimum rate of corporation tax to 15%. The president ajar the door to that debate in a speech in New York, during his stay to attend the annual United Nations assembly. And he was "hopeful" that in the end there will be Budgets, as the Socialist spokesman, Héctor Gómez, repeated in Congress on Thursday. This leader added, yes, that the Executive contemplates many possibilities of saving this project of the public accounts "with the greatest consensus", but "complying with the parameters" and the reforms required by the plans of the millionaire European funds.

Biden as an example

At the same time that the debate on housing was reactivated, United We Can not let up with its fiscal demands either.

Montero, Belarra and Yolanda Díaz herself publicly clinched the message that the government should not be less on the left than that of the president of the United States, Joe Biden, to demand more efforts from large corporations.

Díaz explained it thus: “It cannot be that in Spain hairdressers, bars or other small businesses pay more taxes than large companies.

It is common sense that we step forward and set a minimum of 15% corporate tax.

That is to get out of this crisis together ”.

Another focus of pending conflict between the partners is the dismantling of the PP labor reform, a commitment that Díaz has proposed as inalienable. Although the discussion on this matter is on the sidelines of the budget debate, this week it has again caused a clash between the partners. United We can take to the plenary session of Congress a proposal for the Chamber to pronounce in favor of "repealing" the labor reform of the popular. The PSOE showed strong reluctance to support the text and in fact ended up presenting an amendment. After arduous negotiations between the groups, Unidos Podemos ended up agreeing to lower it. Some of the measures to be corrected in the current labor regulations are detailed in the text, but the word "repeal" is deleted. After the changes made,The proposal went ahead with the votes of the government groups and the PNV, while other leftist formations such as ERC, EH Bildu, Más País or BNG remained in the abstention.