A.A. | “It’s sad, for example, that a good idea, the Minimum Living Income (IMV), hasn’t worked… The reality today is that fewer people are receiving the IMV than were previously receiving the minimum incomes offered by the Autonomous Communities.” This confession was made to us a couple of months ago by a member of parliament from Sumar, the PSOE’s coalition partner in the government, over dessert. He admitted sadly that the bureaucratic requirements to get the IMV were enormous, and that reaching the truly needy people—the abject poor, the homeless…—was much more complex than they had calculated.
Taking advantage of the atmosphere of trust created by his confession, one of the diners—certainly far removed from the postulates of the coalition government—pointed out to him that, sadly, the populist “good-will” of Sumar was clashing and would always clash, again and again, with complex reality: “To fix a problem, it is rarely enough to just pass a law. If that were the case, it would be enough to bring a ‘progressive coalition government’ like yours to Qatar to place the emirate at the head of the West. Unfortunately, if you take all those laws to the Qatari Official State Gazette and at the end of the legislature you look out from a balcony, the most likely thing is that, down below, it will still be Qatar…” The MP smiled.
“It was known that a rent control law like the one implemented in Barcelona—added to a regulation that protects squatting and forces the landlord to pay for the ‘inquiokupa’s‘ (tenant-turned-squatter) electricity, water…—was going to cause a decrease in available flats and, therefore, a greater rise in rental prices…” The Sumar MP fell silent and stopped smiling… “Not to mention that the law now says real estate agencies can’t charge tenants a monthly fee… The reality is that they all still do. And if you want to find a flat, you have no other choice…”
The political season is now beginning. It is the eighth year of the PSOE government, in a coalition with the communists of Sumar. It’s an impossible government that requires parliamentary support ranging from the extreme left to the nationalist and pro-coup Catalan far-right. A majority that only shows itself to be solid, like cement, in its determination to prevent the PP from governing. But it is unable to agree to approve a budget—the government is operating with the 2023 budget, from the previous legislature—or to pass many of the laws—more than 40—that are stalled to avoid giving the government more parliamentary defeats.
In this situation, the resilient Prime Minister—who cannot walk the streets in any town or city in Spain—insists on chest-thumping. He will do so again today on the public television channel, TVE, whose level of degradation is now unbearable.
Always chest-thumping, in any circumstance and on any matter. Basing his incorrigible triumphalism on the claim that Spain is growing more than anyone else. A statement as true as it is absurd. Because with a million new immigrants in two years, with an increase in public debt exceeding 3% annually, with a torrent of European funds that they don’t know how to execute… growing at 2.5% is, more than anything else, inevitable.
But the harsh reality is that the standard of living for Spaniards, for any Spaniard, is no better today than it was eight years ago. That’s why the grandiloquent and self-congratulatory speeches the government uses upset 75% of the population (according to the latest polls). It also prevents a serious rethinking of any of the many problems that Spain faces.
