Vultures, evicted and opportunists
BarcelonaThe political game is accelerating. It is not clear that the actors know where they are going, but it is clear that they are accelerating. As a result, we are all likely accelerating towards new elections. The call will depend on the new period of reflection of the Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, who had not calculated that the haste with which the housing decrees have been managed could end the legislature. How did we reach a parliamentary defeat that puts the legislature against the ropes? With a combination of irresponsibility, greed, opportunism, pressure, and more of a desire to patch things up than to solve them. To begin with, the irresponsibility of the Madrid PP, which acted with cruelty and indifference in a case that required empathy from the administration to avoid the eviction of an 87-year-old person. Irresponsibility also from a left that tries to act as opposition and government at the same time and that, in its struggle with its own left, competes to be at the head of the demonstration.
The Spanish government's decrees were what a top-tier source calls "a quick fix." That is to say, a rapid reaction to try to prevent the fire from worsening. It was not a serious political operation with a transversal and inclusive will to deeply resolve the most urgent and serious problem of the Spanish economy, but rather an imperfect decree, with measures contrary to favoring the supply of rental apartments, but with some measures to avoid the bitterest face of the lack of housing: evictions. It was about trying to put a patch on the most shameful effect of social fragility, and for Junts, it did not seem enough. On Thursday, Junts backed out of an agreement it had been very close to. Some sources speak of having received "pressure like never before."
In one thing, the president of the Junts parliamentary group was right when she said that "the cost is being transferred from one family to another," highlighting the lack of an ambitious and determined policy for public and private construction of social housing. No private entity will build affordable housing if it is not incentivized by the public sector and if the relationship with the bureaucracy, which slows and postpones everything, is not facilitated.
From Isabel to Maricarmen
The fact is that Sánchez's investiture majority has shown once again that it has enough votes to avoid certain policies and prevent alternative majorities, but it lacks a common project with a constructive, consensus-based minimum program. The majority that made Sánchez president has reached the end of the road, and it does so with the change of pace that the amnesty law finally represents. In the coming weeks, former president Carles Puigdemont will be able to return to Catalonia and will have to decide how: whether to reset the counter to zero or to begin the revenge for the years of condemnation abroad. To begin with, voices are starting to rise within his party – obviously in private – calling for a reorganization and an ideological rearmament to make politics, and to recover a center-right political profile that defends small business owners and Catalan companies. If the socialists thought that Puigdemont owed them anything with the amnesty, they were very wrong. The leader of Junts does not usually forget and, if Catalan society has moved on since 2017, his political memory is fixed on the events of October of that year, which mark all subsequent events, including Illa's victory in the Generalitat de Catalunya.
Sánchez is now facing a new diagnosis of a situation he had not foreseen. A new period of reflection that must lead him to establish a new electoral calendar. Around him, many are encouraging him to seize the opportunity. Which one? Well, to take advantage of the scenario that the Minister of Housing defined as: “being with the people or with the vultures.” In other words, calling for elections in a scenario consciously constructed between the supporters of Ayuso's penthouse and the supporters of preventing the eviction of Maricarmen Abascal. If a few months ago the public debate was concentrated on the corruption cases of Ábalos or Cerdán, it subsequently focused on Zapatero's jewels and the very serious migration and diplomatic crisis with Morocco. These were all negative scenarios for the PSOE. Today, attention has shifted to the issue of housing with a clear ideological cleavage between the socialists and the investiture partners (including the PNB) versus the PP, Vox, and Junts. For Puigdemont's party, it is a way to distance themselves from the pro-socialist majority and to begin rebuilding their political space, currently threatened by Aliança Catalana. What is not clear is what social cost they will have to assume in a moment of tension and when it is the children of the middle class who cannot access decent housing. The most honest thing would be to talk about the origins of the situation, but the parties are not willing to talk about low wages, incompetence in the construction of social housing, the mistake of returning existing housing to the market, an economic model too dominated by tourism, access to credit when one cannot save, and a population growth that we do not know how to absorb. That would be too much to ask.
