Pensions, minimum wage and the luxury of indignation

The campaign is looking messy, but I already have my raincoat on so that the mud slides off me, literally and metaphorically. And so, with my hood up, I can still smile when I see that El Mundo titles its Friday front page: “Sánchez will announce the pension increase two days before 29-N”. Explained like this, it seems as if they have dusted off the crystal ball and that the PSOE leader is coming up with populist and desperate measures to save his electoral numbers. In reality, what is happening is that the National Statistics Institute will publish the inflation data on November 27 and it will not be until then that pensions can be updated taking this figure into account, since 2022, the improvement of contributory pensions has been linked to the CPI (calculated between December of the previous year and November of the current fiscal year). Surely there is electoral trickery and these factors have been weighed when deciding the date, but it is the same cunning that El Mundo resorts to when it seeks to deflate the issue and portray Sánchez as a crook. La Razón does something similar: “Díaz will raise the minimum wage above inflation before 29-N”.

Neither of the two newspapers aims to spread the measure itself, which could cheer up retirees and ordinary workers. On the contrary, they want to generate indignation in their (e)lectorate over how these levers are used ahead of the elections. And it may work, especially in an audience that has its basic needs more than covered and that can afford the luxury of perpetual indignation. It is touching that they now raise these news stories to the front page when they have spent eight years hiding or watering them down. Like when, for example, they warned before every SMI increase that this would lead to a wave of layoffs never seen before... while unemployment, quite stubbornly, has been falling until it dropped below the psychological barrier of 10%.