MADRID, Spain – Junts has made good on its threat and, after a roll-call vote, brought down the first housing decree debated this Friday in Congress, the one containing the bulk of the measures and into which requests from the post-convergent party had been incorporated, which is why the government expected to pass it. The second, which included indefinite rental contracts, was already doomed to failure because Carles Puigdemont’s party had already announced its vote against, and so it did. The situation leaves the executive on a knife-edge and fuels the possibility of an early election that ministers of the government themselves had been talking up all morning.
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The post-convergents, who early in the day announced they would share a draft decree with Moncloa and were willing to vote in favour of a new rule if it were renegotiated and the government withdrew the ones that ended up falling this Friday, defended that these initiatives allow funds to keep buying, speculating and evictions to continue. And they do so, in their view, because the government has not dared to legislate against these companies but has done so with thousands of families who strive and endure drowning under an ever-higher cost of living. Junts spokeswoman Miriam Nogueras summed up her refusal to ratify the two texts by saying they will provoke the opposite effect of what they intend, advocating instead for increasing supply and generating legal certainty, as well as pursuing vulture funds. For Nogueras, they are doing the worst thing a politician can do by feeding a lie when what was needed was to correct the policies that have brought this price escalation, not to be repeat offenders.
The party of Carles Puigdemont thus rejected the proposal that Housing Minister Isabel Rodríguez had made to it minutes earlier: processing the two decrees voted on this Friday as a bill to include the corrections that some groups are calling for in exchange for their support or, at a minimum, their abstention.
A few weeks ago they handed the president the draft of a decree-law, and this decree-law has also been worked on over that text, Rodríguez said, addressing Junts’s seats while Pedro Sánchez nodded from his seat, adding that 90 per cent of what they handed to the president is today in the Official State Gazette. The minister admitted that it is true that not all the measures demanded by the post-convergents have been incorporated, as has happened with all parties, but that during months of work a possible balance had been reached that satisfies all parts of the political spectrum.
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Later, Social Rights Minister Pablo Bustinduy, tasked with defending the decree contemplating the establishment of indefinite contracts, said that voting no today on the two housing decrees is to defend the interest of a rentier oligarchy and to turn one’s back on the people. Regarding the PP and Vox, the other two groups that rejected the first decree, the far-right formation’s deputy Carlos Hernández Quero assured that millions of people would forever lose the housing train with this salad of subsidies, in reference to the rule. Finally, the PP’s deputy secretary for Treasury, Housing and Infrastructure, Juan Bravo, accused the government of having an entire generation on pause by aggravating the housing problem, offering the plan his party presented in 2023 and addressing directly the Spaniards outside demonstrating around Congress: We are not going to fail you, we have a plan for you to have a home.
