“The progressive coalition does not consist only of respecting each other, but of expanding the elements in common.” Under this premise, Sumar requested on February 5 the convening of the monitoring commission of the government pact signed with the PSOE. The two formations were summoned to hold a meeting which, being strict with the government agreement, should have been launched in the first month since the formation of the coalition Executive. That is, in December. But, pending the meeting, the disagreements between the coalition partners accumulate. The last, moreover, in a capital issue for Sumar: housing.
The Council of Ministers yesterday gave the go-ahead to the ICO guarantee line of 20% for the entry of a first floor with rents of up to 37,800 euros. A measure that the second vice-president of the Spanish Government, Yolanda Díaz, did not hesitate to catalog as counterproductive, since she understands that it will cause a negative impact with “new increases in housing prices”. But the Galician woman was not the only one to raise her voice, since deputy Gerardo Pisarello described it as “public money given to the banks”.
You might think it was an isolated incident, but the recent appointment of socialist Carmen Calvo as president of the Council of State also provoked the angry complaints of Sumar’s spokesperson for feminism and LGBTI rights, Elizabeth Duval, who criticize the designation of the former vice-president of the central government because he considers her, among others, to be responsible for “obstructing the processing of the trans law with her transphobia”.
But just 24 hours earlier, this time at the international level, Sumar formally complained to the Ministry of Defense about the shipment of ammunition to Israel despite the fact that the Spanish Government had announced that it had been “suspended” since October arms exports to the Hebrew country.
These facts do not in any way threaten to derail the legislature, but they have served to highlight some differences that, until now, Sumar had tried to keep buried. This is what happened with the unilateral decision of the PSOE to agree with the PP on the expansion of the port of Valencia and with the announcement made by the president of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, to undertake the expansion of the Madrid and Barcelona airports.
Despite the fact that the various parties in the confederal space strongly reject this kind of mega-infrastructures – to the point of having included them in their respective electoral programs -, the leadership of Sumar chose to silence their discomfort.
In fact, its leader, Yolanda Díaz, avoided setting any ultimatums in relation to the Valencia, El Prat or Barajas projects, knowing that the PSOE’s determination to put them on the line would weaken Sumar’s role within the Spanish Government from the outset. And he opted for a “wide-view” strategy, ensuring that it was simply necessary to agree on “a general orientation on the budget debate”, taking into account the climate emergency situation.
But the fact is that, with yesterday’s, there are already five disagreements in the first two months of the coalition Executive’s life. And that both of them promised each other a less tense co-governance than the one registered between the PSOE and Podemos during the previous legislature.
