Ángel Collado
After failing in the harassment of Ferrovial to prevent it from moving its headquarters to the Netherlands, Pedro Sánchez has adopted the most populist postulates of his partners and allies on the far left to announce the intervention of the housing market.
The chief executive thus shores up his coalition government with an eye on the pre-electoral race on 28 May at the cost of renouncing the less radical positions that the PSOE and the cabinet’s economic team have held until now.
The sum of the fiascos of the cabinet’s latest laws and initiatives, from the ‘only yes is yes’ law to the public singling out of businessmen or the launch of the vice-president Yolanda Díaz to bring together the entire extreme left, have forced Sánchez to force a change of script in the midst of the pre-campaign. Faced with the problem of the shortage of affordable housing and rising rents, he has opted for intervention in market prices and more difficulties for landlords, even if it means reducing the supply of flats for rent.
The secretary general of the socialists insists on presenting himself as a candidate or reference for the entire bloc of left-wing and pro-independence parties that brought him to power in June 2018 rather than as the leader of a PSOE with aspirations to win with an autonomous and clearly majority project.
In the case of the housing law, this choice, as in the “only yes” law or the transsexuality law, Sánchez accepts all the points that were unacceptable until now for the socialist sector of the cabinet, such as considering citizens with more than five flats to be large property owners, half the current number. It also extends the deadlines by up to two years for executing the evictions of defaulting tenants and does not address the problem of squatting.
The bill, which had been stuck for two years due to differences of criteria between socialists and podemites, now includes all the demands of the far-left parties. Once the agreement was announced by Sánchez in person during a meeting of his party, it was the spokespersons of the most radical parties in the chamber, the Catalan separatists of ERC and the heirs of the political arm of the terrorist group ETA, who gave details of a text shaped with their own initiatives for the intervention of the market.
The head of the Executive, annoyed with Podemos’ reluctance to take the orders of his vice-president Yolanda Díaz, has made a new distribution of roles when it comes to distributing protagonism among his partners. He has sold as an agreement with the most left-wing pro-independence supporters the concessions to the postulates on the matter defended within the cabinet by the current secretary general of Podemos, the minister Ione Belarra.
Sánchez, with all the polls against him except the official CIS polls, which he controls through José Félix Tezanos, needed to promote some measure that would win the favour of all his partners and allies in order to recover an image of unity. Moreover, the project can begin to be processed immediately in Congress so that socialist candidates in the big cities have national backing when it comes to defending measures in the face of such a serious public problem as the price of housing.
Until last week the PSOE has been reluctant to state intervention in the housing market, with price fixing and areas of affected cities as advocated by populist parties. It is a turn that goes against even the most modern tradition, as it was a socialist government of Felipe González in 1985 that first took a decisive step towards the liberalisation of rents with a decree that bore the name of the Minister of Economy of the time, Miguel Boyer.
This regulation by the first PSOE government put an end to the automatic extensions of leases inherited from the Franco era, gave freedom of negotiation to the parties and eventually encouraged the growth of the housing stock on the market. The opposition’s criticisms of Sánchez and his partners’ project point to the consequences that could result in a return to state interventionism: a reduction in the supply of rents and even a higher rise in prices.
The new law of the coalition cabinet has such an electoral tinge that its future application, in the event that it is approved, will then depend on the party or block of parties that governs in each autonomous community, as the competences in the matter are regional, and even local, in the case of large cities such as Madrid or Barcelona.
