It has taken us left-wing voters a few decades to accept that The PSOE cannot be left alone. Not even when, in the name of the bad omen of a ruling right, it demands the useful vote. The historical legend of the party, for which the O of worker weighs more and more, has come to an end. One cannot define oneself as left-wing for a one hit wonder. Especially when we all know that they were the ones who opened the door to liberalism and privatization, which although they reached their wildest heights with the PP governments, it was Felipe Gonzálezback in the 80s, who began to pave the way with the privatization of thirty public companies.
The PSOE whenever it has the opportunity to disappoint you, it takes advantage of it. I think that by witnessing his management of the housing crisis we have the most palpable recent example. In 2021, when PSOE and Unidas Podemos were negotiating the draft housing law, it was necessary to define what was considered a large holder. That is, which person, physical or legal, was detailed as a large homeowner. Let us remember that, until that moment, the PSOE only considered someone who had ten floors or more to be a great owner. That is, a type, or company, with nine apartments owned was the most common for the PSOE. They will tell me which worker in Spain, one of those who appear in the name of the socialist party, owns nine apartments to speculate with. It was then that UP wanted to reduce that limit to five stories or more, something much more reasonable. The PSOE refused. Was José Luis Ábalosthen Minister of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda, who rejected that proposal with the now historic and despicable phrase that housing is a right “but it is also a market good.” Which is like saying that we condemn slavery but that if the market demands slaves, then what are we going to do, slavery is welcome. That should be his red line. Not so much putting limits on Koldo Garcia.
My father worked all his life, hard, and with effort he managed to buy an apartment. One. Being able to have two, for me, means that life has smiled on you. And if we continue adding, three, four, five floors, I enter my own science fiction and I can’t help but consider those people enormously lucky. Either because they have earned amounts enough to buy five apartments or mortgage themselves five times, or they have saved enough – there were five of us in the family and with my father’s salary, which was not bad, we barely made it to the end of the month – or they have inherited with joy. But my head breaks when someone with seven stories tries to compare himself with a family that, through sacrifice and work, managed to buy two houses. The one they live in and the one in the town or the one on the beach. Houses to live in, not to speculate with. I feel that the large owners, using a petty argument, use these small owners, with two or three floors, and place them at the forefront of their interests, to point out how unfair it would be for them to regulate or stop paying them. the rent. In this way, the large holders continue to speculate with housing and rental prices while they tell us the story of the father of the family who bought two apartments and with the rent on one he pays the mortgage on the other.
82% of Spanish deputies are property owners. Four out of ten have more than one home and 20% declare income from rentals. Shouldn’t it be incompatible for a politician to try to regulate the rental market when he is profiting from them? The PP, to no one’s surprise, is the one with the most rentiers in Congress and is followed, to no one’s surprise, by the PSOE. We should begin to assume that PP and PSOE are not two political parties but rather two large companies with their own interests. And, among those interests, is the profit motive. Yes, we are talking about profiting, not about earning a bonus to compensate for a precarious salary or earning just enough to cover the mortgage. We talk about greed and human greed is not regulated with caresses and asking for empathy – another PSOE screw-up in the mouth of its housing minister, Isabel Rodriguez– but by intervening in the market, expropriating housing (let’s start with banks and vulture funds) and building public housing. Everything at once. Radical? Not as much as charging 500 euros for an interior room of seven square meters in a shared apartment or that the average price of a rental in Madrid is 1,776 euros.
What the market is doing, with the approval of the most progressive Government in History, is negotiating and speculating with article 47 of the Spanish Constitution and article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But we are the radicals, who refuse to continue being subjected to the greed of those who have believed that being a landlord is a profession and living off the income, the justification for their usury.
Imagine a street in your city, at rush hour, with a lot of traffic. They hear the siren of the approaching ambulance. And instead of moving aside so that the ambulance can pass, you decide that you were there before and do not move, blocking the path of the ambulance. That is neoliberalism. That is not intervening in the rental market. That is to continue telling that big lie that the market regulates itself.
and the housing crisis It is just one more scenario where the PSOE does not live up to what is expected of a left-wing party. Nor is it when it refuses to lower self-employment rates, to adjust them to what is earned. Or when he says he has found the formula to facilitate access to a decent pension and that magic formula consists of not stopping working. Or when he talks to us about flexible sick leave. And all this, with government partners to his left. Imagine what they would be capable of doing if we left them alone.
#PSOE #left
