In the midst of great expectation filled with confusing messages and even calls for an election, the Government has suffered its harshest parliamentary defeat. Many believe that it is definitive. Congress has overturned the two decrees on housing with which Pedro Sánchez tried to regain the reins of a legislature that has been wounded for many months but which is now blown up by a Chamber that turns its back on him and shows that the Government does not have a majority to support it even in the face of the most extreme problems.
The first of the decrees, for which the Government cherished the expectation of approval, has been overturned by 178 votes against compared to 172 in favor. Junts has been the decisive formation that has dashed Sánchez's hope, by adding its seven votes to those of the PP, Vox and UPN. The second decree, championed by Sumar, and which never had the possibility of being validated, attracts a greater majority against. In this case, the seats of the PNV and the Canarian Coalition are added to the bloc opposed to the first decree.
The debates on both norms have offered a succession of campaign interventions, as if all the participants already sniffed out the imminence of the polls. Many slogans, many warnings, even threatening, and many deep disqualifications as well. A true battle whose end was anticipated.
The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, went up to the speakers' gallery at the end of the debate to make a final appeal to the parliamentary groups to vote "thinking of the people" and "not of party arguments." "The life and future of the people depends largely on what you vote here. I beg you to be brave and coherent," he urged without success. "If these decrees do not come out, the damage will be immense and the blame will lie with those who vote 'no' from their seats," he warned, expressly addressing Junts and the PP to whom he predicted punishment at the polls.
The Minister of Housing, Isabel Rodríguez, in defense of the first of the regulations, has urged the parliamentary groups to take advantage of the "opportunity to put a stop to the speculation that steals lives" and act with "responsibility."
The minister has directly blamed the Popular Party, a party with which the Government has not wanted to negotiate the text of the two housing decrees that will expire today, calling it "the worst right wing in all of Europe." Rodríguez has stressed that the PP is "disqualified from governing the country." On the contrary, he has addressed Junts with a pleading tone, urging his seven deputies not to torpedo the rule, either by voting in favor or by abstaining.
"Today they are going to be judged by their votes; today politics and Spanish democracy are going to be judged," said the minister, who assured that, after the first decree of the Government, the most comprehensive and for which the Executive had hopes of approval, there are "many months of work" and she recalled that a good part of the measures included in the norm have been agreed with the various parties, including the Catalan independentists.
Rodríguez has elaborated on the Maricarmen case as an example of the "collective failure" that has been the impetus for social mobilization and has even compared it with the case of Ramón Sampedro that definitively promoted the debate on euthanasia. The government intervention has had clear overtones of a campaign message.
"The Government's ambition," the minister insisted, "goes far beyond the decree." He has done so before reviewing in general terms the blocks addressed by the decree whose main objective is to put "a tourniquet on the housing drain."
"With the people or with the vultures; with the vultures that evict or with the people who suffer," has been the slogan that Rodríguez has raised, challenging PP, Vox and UPN, whom he accuses of "abandoning" the citizens. "While people are protesting in the streets, you go to Miami or to a vulture fund congress encouraging them to colonize us," he launched, before asking the popular "what those funds offer you." The minister concluded her speech by demanding "responsibility" from the groups.
The representatives of Compromís, Canarian Coalition and BNG have described the measures as "insufficient" but have confirmed their vote in favor.
The spokesperson for Junts, Míriam Nogueras, has responded harshly to the Government. Nogueras has confirmed his group's vote against the two decrees and has accused the Executive of being doing "the worst" and that it is nothing other than "encouraging a lie." The pro-independence spokesperson insisted that the measures proposed by the Government would not solve the "very serious" housing problem; on the contrary, she said, "it would worsen."
Nogueras has asked the Executive to withdraw its decrees and "sit down to negotiate behind closed doors" to issue another complete one. Junts has prepared a text that, according to Nogueras, "is not closed" and could serve as a basis for approving measures capable of beginning to solve the housing problem.
The PNV, for its part, has regretted that the Government tries "in 48 hours" to solve a problem as complex as that of housing, when it has had eight years to address it, and furthermore, it does so through the figure of the decree law that does not allow amendments.
The Basque nationalists announced their decision to support the first of the decrees with their vote but not the second and this despite the fact that they consider it "insufficient." Today it was repeated in the debate by its spokesperson, Maribel Vaquero, who, however, regretted that in the end, all the proposed measures "will come to nothing."
Vox has emphasized that the Government and its partners do not hesitate to use the situation to "fuel their epic." Carlos Hernández Quero has insisted that "in this terrifying crisis" the only thing he has offered has been slogans and "a marketing agency", in reference to Casa 47.
"Your measures only deepen the malaise. You are magicians. You have made half of the supply disappear and prices do not stop rising. You have been like a real plague and now you tell us that to cure the sick we must increase the dose of the poison," launched the Vox representative, who has put his finger on the sore spot of the lack of construction of public housing and, later, has agitated the favorite message of Abascal's people: mass immigration that, in his opinion, "cancels the future of young people and Spanish families" and aggravates housing precariousness.
Gabriel Rufián has focused his intervention on attacking Junts with the utmost harshness for their opposition to the decrees. The ERC spokesperson has placed a 50 euro bill on the platform: "This is their flag. The flag they share with PP and Vox." Then he took out the keys to his house to raise the debate between "that or this." The Republican deputy has warned Nogueras that they are "destroying" his own party and has promised to "work hard" so that Junts ends up in "maximum ostracism." Rufián has also assured that from now on he will ensure that ERC "does not agree" with Junts "for anything" because they are dedicated to "whoring" the people of Catalonia.
Sumar has revolted against the right because of his votes. "Damn the speculators who cause evictions and the rentier rights sold to the vultures that allow our neighbors and grandmothers to stay on the street," proclaimed Gerardo Pisarello, who has assured that every broken family will see in the PP, Vox and Junts "the cruel hand that pulls the trigger of the big rentiers."
His colleague Alberto Ibáñez, from Compromís-Sumar, has accused these groups of "pushing hundreds of people to lose their lives and commit suicide." "Today we not only talk about housing and democracy, but about the right to life"; has said. For this reason, it has reached the point of making them "co-responsible for the deaths, pain and suffering of thousands of people." For the Valencian, the vote is between "freedom and life or death." "Know what you want to vote for," he concluded.
Juan Bravo, on behalf of the PP, has insisted that "eight years" have been what the Government has needed "to destroy Spain." The popular one has regretted that now they are trying to "fix in four days what they have destroyed in eight years and with the same measures that have already failed." Bravo has also taken the opportunity to criticize the "spectacle" that the Executive has put on in recent days, "with its internal discrepancies, with one decree that later became two, with a minister who was not able to explain her own measures and said that she had a cocoa."
According to Bravo, the Government's measures, instead of protecting the vulnerable, turn them into the tenant that no one wants to have. The PP has urged the construction of more public housing: Feijóo proposes one million in the next four years. They also propose an anti-squatter law and a range of tax measures to encourage rental and purchase by both the owner and the buyer or tenant. "You cannot solve the problem; you are the problem," Bravo concluded before addressing the citizens, mainly young people: "We have a plan for you to have a home."
The Minister of Social Rights, Pablo Bustinduy, has given a speech-rally in which he has accused the groups opposed to the decrees of "betraying the people" and "having no flag or shame." In his opinion, "they will sign an infamy with names and surnames." For the minister, what is being debated today in Congress "is not about parliamentary arithmetic" but about "class struggle."
Bustinduy has defended the second decree, the one sponsored by Sumar, which proposes indefinite rental contracts to "end the law of the jungle." The minister, diving like the rest of the speakers into electoralism, has recalled all the social and economic measures that the Government has put on the table at the initiative of Sumar, and has warned PP, Vox, UPN and Junts that "the people will have memory" when they go to the polls.
Canarian Coalition and PNV, two groups in favor of the first decree, but against the second, have explained their position by insisting that the indefinite rental proposed by this second rule would considerably aggravate the problem.
Sumar has insisted that the two decrees are important but they have not been successful with their arguments or with the warning addressed to the opposition that all of this "will be paid for at the polls."
Vox has responded by ensuring that the "only vultures" are the members of the Government. His deputy, José María Figaredo, has insisted on all the times in which Pedro Sánchez has held meetings with the highest representatives of the main investment funds and has repeated that, with an indefinite contract, the rental market would become a "real disaster."
The PSOE has spoken of the "fear" that people have about the situation. Their deputy Monserrat Domínguez has assured that despite losing the vote today, the socialists will continue trying to make "good politics" and not "garbage politics" as in her opinion the PP does.
The PP's response was led by deputy Sergio Sayas, who urged the government partners to come out "to apologize" for "having destroyed the lives of Spaniards with a "destroying" policy that has "made the middle class vulnerable." And in a message addressed to Sumar, he launched: "You have changed the assault on the heavens for the assault on the armchairs."
"The vultures were in the Government and now they want to solve the problem with demagoguery and banners," said Sayas, who has called the left's policies "old-fashioned, retrograde." This Government, he stressed, "is a joint venture of interests against which the PP will raise the flag of freedom."
