The new plan against exclusion shows the failure of the Government in its fight against poverty

“These are unacceptable and unacceptable data,” the minister insisted in statements in which he seemed to mark a distance from a situation in which, in practice, as person in charge of the Social Rights portfolio, he has a direct responsibility, as do his predecessors in office, Ione Belarra and Pablo Iglesias. For Bustinduy, after “the ominous decade of austerity and cuts” and since “in Spain there is a coalition government”, the policies followed have been “done in a diametrically opposite way” and the results “are objective, they are unappealable. It isn’t true. We Spaniards are still just as poor since Sánchez came to power.

According to the risk of poverty or social exclusion rate (Arope, for its acronym in English), the 2019 indicator (corresponding to the year 2018) was 26.2%, compared to 26.5% in 2023. And what Worse, the deviation from the objective set in accordance with the European Union to gradually reduce poverty, with the horizon of 2030, has been increasing. If in 2019 it was 1.3 points (26.2 compared to the 24.9 marked), in 2023 it will already had risen to 5.5 points (26.5 compared to a target of 21). Not in vain, Spain is third from bottom in poverty indicators of the 27 EU countriesonly behind Romania and Bulgaria. In 2023 the Spanish rate was more than five points above the European average (21.4%).

It is in this context that yesterday the minister presented the Strategy to combat poverty for the period 2024-2030, «the roadmap that the Government will follow in the coming years so that Spain reduces its percentage of the population at risk of poverty and social exclusion. In practice, it is a holistic report with all the measures of the different ministries aimed at this end and is an essential requirement for the European Union to unlock its funds for social policies.

It is striking that it will be in January 2025 when a plan is presented whose temporal arc begins a year earlier. Asked by ABC if this delay is due to the fact that her predecessor in office (Ione Belarra) had not prepared anything at the time of her dismissal, or It has not been a priority of the ministry Since it has taken more than a year to see the light, Bustiduy (who took over the portfolio in November 2023) explained that in the last year “an in-depth evaluation of the previous strategy has been carried out and a process of participation of all the actors involved, which is a necessary condition for the strategy to work. To develop the strategy, which was approved in the last council of ministers in 2024, “we have taken the time required by the magnitude of the problem, to provide a diagnosis and appropriate solutions, so it has been an exhaustive process,” he added. .

The truth is that, as ABC has learned, with Belarra at the helm, the ministry had not even begun to take stock of the previous Strategy, which had a duration from 2019 to 2023. In that turbulent electoral year, and with the strong discrepancies between the ministers of the PSOE and those of Podemosthe Executive decided to extend the previous plan, given the risk of losing European funds. It did not seem then that the fight against poverty was a priority of the Government.

Yesterday, at the presentation of the new strategy, another circumstance also drew attention: the main measures that the minister explained in his speech were not explicitly included in the text. Thus, Bustinduy, together with the Minister of Youth and Children, Sira Rego, also present at the eventadvocated the adoption of a “universal child-rearing benefit” and announced that they are “negotiating” for it to appear in the next General State Budgets. This is a measure defended by Yolanda Díaz and “the Sumar ministries” that is in the family law project, whose processing is stalled in the chambers.

Bustinduy went further by demanding “the urgent intervention in the housing market», a measure that is more political than social and that far exceeds the guarantees of access to housing for the most vulnerable people established by the Strategy. Its justification is that “the housing crisis is a factor of social exclusion and poverty since the market works according to speculative logic that does not create any value, it only extracts it.”

The political punchline, already very difficult to justify in the context of the fight against poverty, came in his final words, he noted that “the main threat to democracy is the obscene concentration of wealth and power in a few hands, in the hands of the ‘ultra-rich’. And if not, just look at the richest man in the world, Mr. Elon Musk, playing ‘Risk’ with the European democracies and putting social networks to the fore. antidemocratic political projects servicebut openly fascist.

“Defending democracy today involves confronting this political project and doing so through the redistribution of income and wealth,” he added. “In Spain, 10% of the population concentrates 50% of the wealth while half of the population owns hardly anything,” which is why he advocated a “distribution of wealth in our country, which is deeply unequal, unfair and “which is harmful to the general interests.” According to what he stated, “three out of every four Spaniards support that the tax pressure on large assets increases and large companies to be able to reinforce public services and the welfare state.