What Body wrote in Brussels and what Calviño said in the Government: No to intervening in rental prices

One of the largest and most controversial economic policy measures of the Government of Pedro Sánchez does not respond to the philosophy of the only two Ministers of Economy that he has had in his eight years in power. In the European Commission, the work that the current first vice president of the Government, Carlos Body, did during his time as a technician in Brussels is still used as a reference. It is the document titled The regulation of the rental market in the European Union that he wrote in 2014 together with Peter Pontuch and Sona Kalantaryan.

There, the current vice president wrote: "Rent control appears to have a significantly destabilizing impact on the housing market as a whole, increasing the volatility of housing prices when faced with different types of shocks such as changes in population, disposable income, residential investment and long-term interest rates." His work appears in the bibliography of the 2025 report of the European Commission against imposing controls, as this newspaper published last year.

The then youngest Corps also analyzed the reform introduced by Mariano Rajoy's Government in 2013 and highlighted this point: "According to the new law, tenants who are in arrears in paying rent can be evicted within a period of ten days from the presentation of the claim. Until now, the owner had to go to court and first obtain a ruling on the unpaid rents, which could subsequently lead to eviction. For his part, the tenant had the possibility to pay at the last minute and hinder the execution of the eviction".

In his opinion, with that reform of the PP, "Spanish legislation has effectively become more flexible with regard to setting rents and more neutral when it comes to establishing incentives between owners and tenants." It contrasts with the current Government's criticism of this same measure by Rajoy, considering that it unprotected the tenant by reducing the years of the rental contract and facilitating evictions.

Body's predecessor, the current president of the European Investment Bank, Nadia Calviño, was also very critical, even in public, of the pressure from Podemos ministers when she was minister. "Regulating rental prices is not a measure that will solve all problems, it is not the balm of Fierabrás," she declared in 2021. And, asked about putting caps on rents, Calviño declared this in February 2023: "Citizens do not want us to give messages that are easy and that at a given moment may be attractive, but that do not solve the problems."

In his memoir, More than 2,000 days in the Government, Calviño cleared up all doubt last year. She was not in favor of intervening in prices even in March 2020 when the pandemic broke out and she relates her clash with the then second vice president, Pablo Iglesias: "He started strongly: 'I'm going to tell you what you have to do for the Royal Decree Law to pass: in addition to freezing the payment of mortgage loans, we must freeze the payment of all rents in the country.' I told him that we could not do it without carefully evaluating the impact it could have, very significant, on all homeowners, many of them. middle-class people. He didn't let me finish my reasoning and repeated that he would only leave under his conditions. He threatened to talk to the president, so I told him: 'You yourself...', and that's how the conversation ended.

Yes, it went ahead as Iglesias wanted in new evidence that Sánchez has supported his Podemos or Sumar partners for political convenience in the eyes of his economic officials. It does not make sense that the Body is enthusiastic about the Housing decrees, but they have been approved twice, despite the fact that the sector and recognized experts consider that they include counterproductive measures.