With the Executive of Pedro Sánchez facing Madrid for the recent approval of the Housing Law, the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, bet to recover the attacks on the economic management of the Central Government as a way to undermine his legacy of these years. “We do not share their triumphalism”, assured the popular from Zaragoza, for whom to say that the economic situation in Spain is good, including the GDP, the deficit or the debt, “is a departure from reality” .
According to the leader of the opposition, Spain is the only European country that, along with the Czech Republic, has not yet recovered the GDP of 2019. “We are poorer than five years ago”, he emphasized. He also mentioned a report from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) that points out Spain as one of the countries where family incomes and the purchasing power of wages have fallen the most, while fiscal pressure has risen . “The Spanish have less and less money in their pockets, pay more taxes and have less purchasing power”, he assured from Plaça del Pilar.
Feijóo spared no bullets. Regarding the latest unemployment figures, he said that it was “bad data”, especially due to youth unemployment. He criticized the “fiscal greed” of the Spanish Government, which he described as “incompatible” with “respect” for the middle classes and the most vulnerable. And he considered that “it is not acceptable” that the personal income tax of those who receive less than 40,000 euros is not adjusted or that the VAT of products such as meat, fish or preserves is not lowered.
On his fourth visit this year to Aragonese territory, which he completed with a rally in the afternoon in Huesca, he described the new housing law as “the claudication of the PSOE towards populism and independence”. Beyond political considerations, Feijóo pointed out that the rule does not solve the current housing problems – prices will rise and supply will fall, he insisted – and that it does not respond to the illegal occupation of 50 homes that, he said, they pass every day in Spain.
“Populism, price intervention and illegal occupation of housing is not compatible with what the vast majority of citizens who are renting, paying a mortgage” or who have just paid it and do not want anyone to installed in his house “illegally”, he added.
Faced with the “unfulfilled and reheated” promises of Sánchez, Feijóo assured that he does not plan to make “a single one” if he does not first agree with the town councils, which are the ones who lay the ground, and with the autonomous communities, in charge of ‘execute the works. It also influenced his willingness to help young people who want to buy or rent a residence with guarantees and to make municipal land available for housing in order to reduce prices by “up to 40%”.
In another order of things, Feijóo defended the attitude of his party in Europe, whose president, Manfred Weber, recently accused the European Commission of “campaigning” the Spanish Government regarding the Andalusian bill on the Doñana park. “I have nothing to add to the position of the first party in Europe (the PPE) and its president”, he said. Even so, Feijóo considered it “obvious” that there is “a use of the central Government to campaign”, as he believes the two convictions of the Central Electoral Board against the spokeswoman of the Executive for “having held meetings in press conferences of the Council of Ministers”.
