Alberto Núñez Feijóo has left the main announcement for the end of his speech: “Are we convinced that we must recover and reinforce the flat rates and the zero rate for the first year of a self-employed? Yes. Are we going to include it among our commitments programmatic? Yes.”

This is how Alberto Núñez Feijóo has launched his first hard-hitting economic electoral promise: no self-employed worker would pay the fee in his first year of activity. He has proclaimed it during his intervention at the IV Forum of Entrepreneurs and Self-Employed ATA.

In front of the president of this association, Lorenzo Amor, and the leader of the CEOE, Antonio Garamendi, Feijóo has promised to include this measure not only in his national electoral program, but also in the framework program for the 28M elections. “I have come to announce it here so that you keep my face, and so that later you do not say that politicians announce things and do not do them,” stressed the leader of the PP.

In addition, he has promised to “encourage the hiring of the first worker by the self-employed”, give “a boost to digitization” and “promote generational replacement plans in the self-employed”.

“Supporting the self-employed is called employment and well-being”, he assured, after recalling that the self-employed were one of the groups hardest hit by the pandemic, with “little” support from the Administration that had to be alleviated with regional funds .

On the day that marks the third anniversary of the first state of alarm, Feijóo has highlighted that Spain has not recovered its GDP prior to the pandemic, being the country “with the highest unemployment in the EU”, and that “without computing the more than 400,000 fixed discontinuous without activity”, with “13.2 million citizens at risk of poverty”, with the debt skyrocketing, in the queue for the execution of European funds and leading the rise in prices -16.6%- in food. “The reality is that all of Spain has been left behind in the post-pandemic recovery” because “Spain is the country that has managed the crisis the worst,” he added.

Feijóo has lamented the situation of the self-employed, who in 2022 lived “one of their worst years”, because only “five self-employed workers joined the system. Five”. And because more than 90% saw increased activity expenses. And because only 25% saw their business grow. “One in every four”.

Finally, he has described the pension reform imposed by the Government as a “patch”, without dialogue and consensus, which raises contributions to the whole world and will have to be reviewed in 2025, with which now “it will endure the electoral period and not ensures the sustainability of pensions”

“To guarantee pensions, more employment, more growth and more certainties are needed,” Feijóo warned, and regrets that with this reform neither current nor future pensions are guaranteed * He exposes the main proposals of the PP to reactivate the economy : control public accounts and reduce the deficit; simplify bureaucratic expenses; selective tax reduction; take advantage of European funds and promote the necessary reforms to guarantee job creation.

Before the ATA act, at a breakfast with Fernando López Miras, president of Murcia, Feijóo stressed to the press that he does not intend to “be an accomplice” of the Government when it comes to “leaving a hole for current pensions and a hole still greater for future ones”. “I am not going to be responsible for that because I am not going to deceive the Spanish,” he emphasized.

In his opinion, the new pension reform puts “at risk the pensions not only of those who collect them now, but also of those who expect to collect them. According to Feijóo, the analysis made by the Executive is that it is “simply” going to “hold on until the end of the legislature and whoever is in the year 2025” to solve “the hole” created.

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