The increase in the minimum interprofessional salary (SMI) is one of the main government flags. When Pedro Sánchez arrived at La Moncloa, in June 2018, he was set at 735 euros. This 2025, workers subject to this indicator will charge 1,184 euros. A 60% increase that has led to the socialist part of the coalition government to raise its direct taxation for the first time, via IRPF. The PP, which has systematically opposed all those increases that accumulate 449 euros, but now cries out for about 20 euros of taxes to a part of the workers who charge it while hiding that the other income will also pay more, including the highest.
The history of the PP and the SMI is the story of a double speech. It exemplifies it very well the intervention of Alberto Núñez Feijóo during his failed attempt to investigate. It was September 2023 and the leader of the PP raised his “commitment to reach 60% of the average salary”, in line with what is requested by the EU Rights Charter and with the approach that united Podemos, first, and add, afterwards, afterwards They have led to the Council of Ministers.
Feijóo added, in reference to the PSOE: “With you, the increase in the minimum wage is below the price increase and with us the increase in the minimum wage exceeds the increase in prices.” Two statements that are not correct, since not all PP governments have uploaded the SMI equal to or more than the CPI (did not, for example, José María Aznar). But all socialist governments have increased the indicator above the basis of life, both with José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and Pedro Sánchez.
In this last stage, between May 2018 and December 2024, prices have risen around 20%. The SMI, above 60%.
But beyond the dialectical manipulation, the PP tries to cover its own management of the SMI both when it ruled and in the opposition. Mariano Rajoy assumed power with an absolute majority after the elections of November 2011, and maintained this indicator practically frozen during his mandate.
During his first term, 14 euros rose, from 641 euros in 2011 to 655 of 2016. By then, the PP had lost the absolute majority and had broken into Congress Podemos and Citizens, with very different speeches about the indicator. The following year, the SMI made a small jump, up to 707 euros. And in 2018 another, up to 735 euros.
Acting by the opposition, Rajoy signed at the end of 2017 with the unions and the employer an agreement to increase the SMI progressively to 850 euros between 2018 and 2020. But the last president who has had the PP did not have time to put time to put his plan for the motion of censure that took him from the Moncloa in advance in June 2018.
Pablo Casado replaced Rajoy at the head of the PP after imposing himself on Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría thanks to the vote of the delegates in an extraordinary congress even though he lost the primaries.
The progressive coalition passed over Rajoy’s agreements and already in 2019 raised the SMI to 900 euros. It was the beginning of a series of increases that have brought the indicator in 2025 to 1,184 euros.
Pablo Casado’s PP opposed all SMI increases. Taken for his vehemence, the then opposition leader came to promise that he would enforce the agreement signed by Rajoy and the social agents to set an SMI of 850 euros in 2020, which would imply lowering the minimum wage set by law for the first time. In principle, 50 euros per month. Actually, more.
Because in 2020, as soon as the first coalition government between the PSOE and Unidas Podemos was released, a three -band pact that included employers and unions set the SMI at 950 euros. 100 more than those planned by Rajoy and those defended by Casado.
The PP opposed in a taxative way, despite the agreement of the social dialogue. That time, the previous one and the following. From the national headquarters of the Madrid street of Genoa, the spokesmen and leaders of the party throughout Spain were distributed to the spokesmen and leaders. Casado gave him a voice: “We have already said, as the employer has said, that it was going to produce a lot of unemployment in the month of January.”
Thus, while the PP leader defended an alleged rise from the SMI that, in reality, was going to be a decrease of 100 euros, from the Genoa factory the idea was launched that increasing the indicator would be the cause of unemployment and crisis. In addition, Casado tried to explain that his party always negotiated with social agents the labor issues, but Mariano Rajoy imposed in 2012 his labor reform, as well as the subsequent decisions about the SMI. Only at the end of 2017, with the surveys showing a social climate of rejection of their policies, he was negotiating.
The PP did not change position or pandemic or the successive social agreements led by the then Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, today also vice president. “It will only destroy productive fabric, slow down the creation of jobs and reduce prosperity,” the PP left in writing in 2022. Then, the unemployment was lower than the one left in 2018, with a lower SMI 230 and with the world still paying the consequences of pandemia. Studies claim that the increase in the minimum wage in 2019 reduced inequality and labor poverty rates.
It was February already married just a few days in front of the PP. Feijóo and the barons already prepared the hand coup that led to leadership change. A few days later, Russia invaded Ukraine and prices throughout Europe shot themselves.
With the unbelievable IPC, the government sat with employers and unions to negotiate the 2023 SMI With economic reasons.
“The effort has to leave the administration in the first place and then ask businessmen for that effort,” said the Economic Vice Secretary, Juan Bravo, in September 2022 as a way of diverting the debate about the SMI towards another on taxes. The coalition government used the rise in prices as a lever in its negotiation, while the PP assumed the employer’s story and requested a limited increase.
Because the social debate was no longer about the need or not to upload the SMI, if not how much the indicator should upload. A triumph of the defenders to increase the minimum that any worker must charge in Spain that Feijóo led to his own investiture speech a year later.
The PP still maintained a critical speech with raising the SMI while defending the increase. In 2022, Feijóo requested a “balanced with the competitiveness of companies” despite assuming “an inflation of 13% the last two years” and “an exponential increase in mortgages of 200-300 euros on average per month.” His fear, affect “the competitiveness of companies and the Spanish productive fabric, not to lose their jobs.” Feijóo did not give figures and referenced in those of the employer.
Already in 2023, Feijóo surprised with an advertisement: place the SMI in 60% of the average salary. He did it in his investiture debate and when he was already fully aware that Congress was not going to designate him president of the Government. A proposal that was not in the electoral program of the PP and away from the postulates of the CEOE.
The government gives air to Feijóo’s speech
From that proposal of Feijóo there is nothing left, and the PP has returned to criticism of the minimum interprofessional salary. One of the most recent and novel was that of Isabel Díaz Ayuso, who took advantage of the 2024 -end presidents conference to launch the idea of establishing a different SMI for each autonomous community.
“The minimum wage should not be the same for an Extremadura farmer as for a Madrid businessman,” said Ayuso behind closed doors to the regional presidents and Pedro Sánchez himself. A phrase that collects an old claim of the employer and that obtained complicit support or silence in the ranks of the Madrid leader. For example, of President Extremadura herself, María Guardiola.
Only Juan Manuel Moreno chose to contradict Ayuso, perhaps aware that Andalusia is the region where more people charge the SMI.
Something that should also have taken into account the first vice president of the government and next candidate of PSOE in Andalusia, María Jesús Montero, before ending part of the fiscal exemption of the SMI.
Until this year, the salary part of each Spanish worker equivalent to the SMI was out of tax IRPF. A formula that benefits the low salaries preceptors, but not only since every salary was tax free in that section.
The internal anger in the government has allowed the PP to take air. Not only because he has covered his support for the social decree that includes the rise in pensions after lying in the first vote, but because he places the debate in one of his strengths: taxes.
Feijóo has defended this week that Spain is “a fiscal hell”, although the tax pressure is below the EU average. It is irrelevant that only 20% of the SMI percectors are going to pay about 20 euros per month of IRPF (2% on the total), and that this decision also supposes that the highest income will also be increased proportionally their taxation.
The PP has found a way to divert the debate of its own contradiction and a message that does not correspond to economic data. Both Feijóo and its economic manager or their parliamentary spokesman, Miguel Tellado, have assured in recent days that raising the minimum wage destroys companies, especially SMEs, rises unemployment and reduces the productivity of workers.
The reality is different, as stated by the secretary general of the CCOO union in a post on Twitter: “There are more SMEs, more employment in them and have a upper average size.” And the INE data attests to it.
This Friday, Tellado has also pointed out that the SMI is not agreed with the employer, but the PP in the past has not supported the increases that did have the approval of the employer.
Last January, the Economic head of the PP left a phrase for the newspaper library that defines well what they think of the party leading Feijóo. “You have to value how far the SMI can be uploaded without being destroyed,” he said, before the government’s decision was made public. Exactly, the same idea that Pablo Casado already defended in 2019.
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