Last face to face of the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition in the Senate before the appointment with the polls on May 28. The debate is held a month after the municipal and regional elections in which the PSOE and PP face off in an all or nothing search for the best position on the starting track for the final race towards the general elections in December.
Pedro Sánchez has gone to the Upper House at his own request, calculating the most propitious moment for his electoral interests, a moment in which, under the pretext of reporting on the measures put in place to deal with those derived from the war in Ukraine, he has used to launch a new announcement to complete the new housing policy that now, at the end of the legislature, is committed to launch. The current housing problem arises, in his opinion, “from the culture of pitching and speculation promoted by the Popular Party.”
Thus, Sánchez has promised to build 20,000 new homes on Ministry of Defense land. “In the coming years”, he said without further specificity, “up to 183,000 public homes will be made available to citizens”, compared to the “1,600 that”, according to his data, “projected the PP during his years in government”.
This new promise of the president has been replicated by the leader of the PP with a single sentence: “This already seems like the miracle of the breads and the floors.” From the PP it is pointed out that from July 2018 to the present, Sánchez and his ministers have announced up to twenty times the construction and mobilization of public housing as well as rental aid, promises that, according to the popular ones, have never been came true. “In total,” they say, “Sánchez has announced the construction or mobilization of more than 420,000 homes since he was president.”
“Now it’s time to change the model so that housing is a right and not a commodity,” he stated, insisting that during the last four years his government has built 60,000 public homes and set a limit on rent increases during the pandemic
Sánchez has defended the Housing Law that next Thursday will be approved by the Congress of Deputies and to it he has added the plans to rehabilitate up to half a million homes, the mobilization of the properties in the hands of Sareb and the activation of a line of credit for 4,000 million for social rental housing.
With this last promise, the President of the Government rounds off the “most important social shield in history” -45,000 million mobilized- activated to protect citizens from the crisis caused by the pandemic and, later, by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Sánchez has puffed up his economic measures that have served, he has said, to “protect income, reverse cuts.” However, after learning today that Spain is the country in which the purchasing power of workers has been reduced the most as a result of the very high inflation, the president has asked the business leadership to return to the negotiating table to agree on wage increases .
“The Government has not lowered nor is it going to lower it”, he assured before pointing out that what has changed with this Executive is that “it does not inhibit itself, nor does it look the other way, it faces the problems and tries to solve them” not as in the stage of the PP in which “the Government was not there and when it was there it was to start trembling”. The president has lost the opposition that “do not bother” and has accused the PP of defending “the same elite as always” that plays “with the marked cards” and only thus are explained “the family dynasties in the great powers economic”.
For the president, there are five essential things for Spaniards: “A job with a dignified salary that is achieved with a modern productive model and labor regulation with rights”, as he claims to have put in place, contrary to what the PP did, which , in his opinion, was nothing more than “squeezing labor and evading taxes from other countries.”
The second point that Sánchez wanted to focus on was climate change. In this field, he has attacked the denialism of Vox and has extended the criticism against the PP for the proposed irrigation law that the Junta de Andalucía proposes for the area of ??Doñana. The president has urged the popular to “abandon castling and arrogance” and withdraw their “outrage” and has accused the Board of not having “institutional loyalty.”
In addition, he has rejected the National Plan on water proposed by the PP because, in his opinion, “it is late”, since his Government has already approved “third generation hydrographic plans”. He has assured that he “has been working for years” in favor of sustainable agriculture and to avoid the abusive use of water. “All this is the opposite of what is being perpetrated in Doñana,” he said before asking to “throw away” the Junta’s plan and warning: “I assure you that we are going to stop it.”
Next, the President of the Government has abounded in his proposal to distribute the institutions throughout the national geography. He has maintained that neoliberalism encourages recentralization and has ensured that “for the State to be close to the citizens, it must be the State that approaches the territories.”
“Our goal for the future is to build a more decentralized Spain in which being born in the provinces does not mean having fewer opportunities,” he stressed. “We still do not have the Spain that we progressives want, many more goals are missing and we find the motivation to continue working in them,” he said, emphasizing that the problems that exist in Spain have not been created by his government, “they have dragged on since decades ago.” “The difference is that with this government, structural problems are being faced and Spain is advancing. What we have to do now is not to abandon this direction.”
The opposition leader has reproached Sánchez for the triumphalism of economic data carefully selected by La Moncloa, hiding the most negative figures. Feijóo recalled that the freezing of pensions and the drop in the salaries of civil servants is something that “can only be attributed to a socialist government, that of Zapatero, and with the vote of Pedro Sánchez.”
“You live off the debt and the deficit and that is impoverishing the measured and low incomes of Spain,” he accused. And he added: “If Spain is doing so well, why doesn’t it call elections now?”
Feijóo has recalled the fiasco of the ‘yes is yes’ law and has stated that he will vote in favor of the reform. “You’re welcome, Mr. Sánchez, you’re welcome”, he affirmed, making the chief executive ugly that he has not thanked the PP for his support to correct a disastrous rule. “I will vote”, has assured the president of the PP, “not like you”. And then he has delved into the divisions of a government that, he has said, “is embarrassing; do you feel humiliated, as your Podemos ministers say?” “Are you as macho as your second vice president says?” “Do you believe that Morocco is a dictatorship?” After the barrage he has sentenced: “Your government is broken; today it has three fractions and twenty acronyms”, but “neither the ministers have the dignity to resign nor do you have the authority to dismiss them”.
“You are a drag on your party. You will be the first president in the history of democracy who does not appear in the general elections to win. You are what most Spaniards want to overcome: repeal sanchismo”, Feijóo stressed. who has summarized Sánchez’s policy with two words: “deceit” and “populism”. “You have become rotten”, has accused the leader of the PP, who has assured that with the new announcement of the creation of houses that the President of the Government has launched today, “this resembles the miracle of the breads and the floors”.
In relation to Doñana, Feijóo has insisted on his proposal to promote a great national water plan and has asked, paraphrasing Alfonso Guerra, “not to use electorally” the problem of the national park. “His problem, Mr. Sánchez, is me, me, me” and he concluded with a blunt sentence: “His time is over.”
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
