Escrivá reaffirms an “imminent” pension agreement that Podemos denies

The Minister of Social Security, José Luis Escrivá, turns a deaf ear to the words that come both from Brussels and from his government partners in relation to the pension reform and remains in his thirteen. The agreement to close the second phase of measures is “imminent” and there is no risk that Europe will impose the toughest sanctions on Spain for not complying in this area.

This was stated this Wednesday during an interview on LaSexta, reiterating that optimism that he exhibited during the visit he made to Brussels this week and from which United We Can totally distanced himself. “We are working and it is imminent to reach an agreement in the different areas,” repeated Escrivá, who also denied that Brussels is going to strongly sanction Spain for not complying with the pension agreement. «The Commission did not talk about Spain, about pensions. He made a communication only to clarify how the milestones were going to be evaluated in general, “he specified.

Escrivá also downplayed the importance of complying with Brussels and stressed that the pension reform is going to be carried out “not so much because it is a milestone in recovery, but because it is a commitment to the Toledo Pact and to the social agents ». And he insisted: “We are on time and we are on the right track.”

But the disagreement with United We Can is such that they do not even agree on whether there is an agreement or not. Thus, the spokesperson for En Comú Podem, Aina Vidal, accused Escrivá of “selling an agreement that he has not agreed to” neither with the parliamentary groups nor with the social agents and warned that “there will be no agreement” if he does not give his arm to twist and eliminates his proposal to implement a new pension calculation method that extends the number of years that are taken into account, since there is no consensus neither with Unidas Podemos nor with the rest of the parliamentary forces.

However, when expressly asked about this issue, the minister, despite trying not to speak of an extension of the calculation period itself, but of adaptation to the new, more intermittent careers, did end up acknowledging that he maintains his idea of ​​extending the years. “There will be an element of these characteristics in the norm, of course,” he pointed out, although he denied that it implies a cut in pensions.

However, to try to attract left-wing groups and unions to the agreement, Escrivá is now considering that the two formulas for calculating the pension of new retirees, the old and the new, coexist for a while, as anticipated by this newspaper.