“We have managed the worst pandemics. We have survived. Now it’s time to take another step, it’s time for a social agenda, budgets and public policies to improve the lives of those at the bottom. To guarantee our people a good life. And that’s not asking too much”. This is how the second vice president of the Government, Yolanda Diaz, has summarized the position of United We can before the imminent negotiation with the PSOE to present the draft General State Budget 2022. A negotiation that will lead by the socialist part the Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero; and by the United We can, the Secretary of State for Social Rights, Nacho Álvarez, who will start the work in the coming days.
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After a first half of the legislature dedicated to fighting the coronavirus and its consequences, in the confederal group believe that the time has come to move forward on the program that led them to the Moncloa. “The budgets must serve to deploy the social agenda of the Government. If not now, when?” Diaz asked in his second speech to the parliamentary group of United We can that has been broadcast by streaming. “This crisis can not be harmed out of the usual,” he said. And he has demanded that the accounts are directed to “the social majority”, that “flood everything” and that “they belong to the whole society”.
Yolanda Diaz has shelled before the parliamentary group the main lines of the project that will lead to the negotiating table with the PSOE. The Vice President said that the Budget 2022 must give “response to the social, climate and care crisis” facing the Spanish. “They must be Budgets of common sense, to favor the social majorities, everyone. Vote for whoever you vote for,” he added.
Diaz has marked the priorities that will bring to the negotiating table with the PSOE. Thus, he spoke of a budget “for those who can not pay the electricity bill today, for those who can not afford the rent today. Or for people who can’t make ends meet”. “They are people of flesh and blood, they are our people,” he said. “They have to reach, like a gentle rain, all these sectors,” he said.
The price of electricity is at record highs, while compliance with the government agreement to review some aspects of the sector and try to reduce the cost of light for the consumer remains bogged down. In housing, three quarters of the same: the state law negotiated by PSOE and United We can, and that according to the parties agreed to collect mechanisms to lower rents, accumulates months of delay to which is now added a ministerial change that they did not count on.
The leader of United We can also pointed to young people “who can not even have a job” as one of the priority objectives of the 2022 Budget so that “do not decide to have children based on public support or family”, but because they want it or not. In short, “so that they have a future, decent work, housing, and their benefits recognized”.
Diaz has also had an express message for women, to whom the Budgets of 2022 must “tell them that the only way to work is not precariousness”. That they are “by and for women”. That they have “a strong feminist accent” with the goal of “completing the welfare state”. “We have to solve the care crisis from the approach of co-responsibility,” she said, concluding with an express reference to ILO Convention 189 on domestic workers, pending signature and that the Minister of Labour also notes in her own account of “must” of this first part of the legislature.
Yolanda Diaz has also referred to “the huge number of elderly people who live on a minimum pension” and 25% of children “who are at risk of poverty”. “These are not figures, they are human beings,” she reiterated.
Diaz calls for “courage” to the PSOE to reform the tax system
One of the major stumbling blocks of the negotiation will be taxes. The Ministry of Finance plans to make public in 2022 a report by a group of experts on the Spanish tax system, as recalled Tuesday Diaz, collects seven points less than the EU average. But from United We believe that we should not wait so long because that would take the reform they advocate to 2023, election year.
The second vice president has called for “ambition, courage and naturalness” to review “public revenue” and “modernize the revenue structure to accommodate the economic relations of the twenty-first century. Diaz has cited the Spanish Constitution to quote thenclude that “those who have more have more to contribute to the public coffers”.
“They must be budgets that redistribute the income and benefits of those who have the most. That is why we are here, to redistribute income and wealth,” said Yolanda Diaz.
Ecological transition “with the workers inside”.
In a recent interview in elDiario.es, Nacho Álvarez pointed out that there are elements such as the 15% minimum tax on companies that could be implemented immediately, but delayed the imposition of green taxation “while we do not guarantee that there are subsidies specifically aimed at lower income groups” that are affected by the ecological transition.
In this sense, Diaz has called on the PSOE to address the “climate crisis” with policies opposite to those that the Socialists put in place in the 80s and whose consequences the vice president knows firsthand. “We are talking about big things, about a just transition, with the workers inside,” she said, as opposed to “the reconversions that did not work and that have turned regions from north to south into industrial deserts, paradigms of despair and poverty”.
An account of 2022, Diaz concluded, to serve “so that no one is afraid”. “Fear of losing their job”, of “being left alone” and that “guarantee second chances”.
In the meeting have also intervened, in open, the head of Cabinet of Yolanda Diaz, Josep Vendrell, and Nacho Alvarez himself. Vendrell, who was debuting in this type of acts, has claimed in a brief intervention that United We can count on an advantage in the negotiation of these Budgets: that Citizens is no longer part of the equation. “The starting point is the multi-national progressive majority,” he said.
Vendrell said that the budgets have to be “of the coalition government”, that the action of Unidas Podemos should not remain only in its ministries: “Our stamp will be on the whole of the budgets”. He has also anticipated that the public accounts of 2022 will be “of the coalition government”.The new legislation will be submitted to Congress “jointly by the president and the second vice-president” and that the parliamentary negotiation “will be joint”.
Finally, Vendrell has urged the deputies to “make politics with the budgets so that they are an element of leverage, of broadening the social base of the political space” before the tight electoral cycle that is drawn on the horizon and that, if there are no changes, will distribute almost all the Spanish institutional power in 2023.
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