What are the components of Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s brain? Without wanting to reach a scientific conclusion, we could say that a quarter of them are obsessed with the idea that Pedro Sánchez is evil and a threat to democracy. Another portion of the same size is centered in Catalonia. The next one thinks about ETA, even if it goes through stages of low activity. The last quarter suffers for Venezuela, especially on specific dates, although it is ready to stop doing it if there is another issue that suits it better.
The last three parts must now give way to a different concern. This is not unusual, but it is new. Feijóo wants to be a good person and take care of those who need help. Have ideas about it. Regarding social spending, some media indicate that it would represent an incursion into traditional left-wing territory. To the famous question – does no one think about the children – the leader of the PP is clear: me and no one other than me?
Suddenly, his heart is overflowing with love. Soon, Miguel Tellado will start looking at you strangely while you clean the instruments made in Albacete. Boss, you’re not going soft, are you?
Being the main opposition party forces us every week to choose a weak point in the government to put pressure on it. There are issues which, due to their importance, remain on the agenda for weeks or months. The PP, not keen on innovation, could spend years hammering out the same thing. The improvement in the economic situation since 2021 has left him without the possibility of attacking this flank, which has forced him to focus on the same repertoire.
This Tuesday, his parliamentary group submitted a proposed conciliation law to Congress and was not stingy with its praise. It is the “most ambitious law of democracy”. Among its measures, free nursery schools from zero to three years, the extension of paternity and maternity leave, the recognition of single-parent families and the extension of their leave, and bonuses for hiring assistants. caregivers for large and single-parent families.
By diagnosing the problem of conciliation, the PP partly shares the analyzes made by the government. As you might expect, there are big differences between the solutions. It aims to remove the obligation to take the first six weeks of paternity leave for the father.
This loses an advantage of the current situation: from the first moment, both spouses are jointly responsible for care. With this proposal there is a risk that the man adapts the time when he starts the leave to the needs of the company. Maybe not intentionally.
The reduction of working hours is another issue on which the PP suddenly reacted as if it were another party. Instead of announcing that capitalism will die if it continues, he accepts the idea in principle with appropriate changes. There is no need to read even the fine print to verify that the reduction is not what workers expect. In short, it involves working more hours each day so that you can work fewer days per week, four instead of five. The weekly working day would therefore remain at forty hours.
Even this formula consisting of working less to end up working the same will not convince the Madrid PP, guardian of Thatcherite essences. Four working days a week are anathema to Isabel Díaz Ayuso. Just check what he said in the Assembly in Más Madrid in 2021: “The citizens work more than you, that the only thing they propose at the time of the reactivation of the Spanish economy is to work four days. Did the lazy Errejón come here to say that we have to work for four days? Ayuso hears the words “social turning point” and starts to get nervous and insulting.
The PP also has ideas on a new housing law, which it will present in the coming weeks, while its regional governments refuse to apply the measures of the law in force in areas marked by the high price of apartments. There, the party does not deviate from the principles it has defended for decades. He proposes to liberalize more land in accordance with the law approved under the government of José María Aznar. At the time they announced that prices were going to go down and what happened was the opposite. The price per square meter doubled between 1998 and 2005.
The left generally accuses this law of having led to the real estate bubble, although this misfortune had many necessary relatives and collaborators, starting with financial entities and the Bank of Spain.
Free land and tax breaks for apartment owners who have not yet rented them are the main current revenues of the PP. Nothing on speculation or the extension of measures to limit seasonal rentals throughout Spain. The PP – along with Vox and Junts – voted in Congress in September against their implementation.
The right does not believe that speculation exists, contrary to existing evidence, nor that the market has transformed housing into an investment good. This would give a bad image to businessmen and individuals for whom this is a big business and whom the PP wants to protect from any regulation that could harm them.
Both in matters of conciliation and working hours, the PP establishes the commercial exception. “This must be agreed between the company and the worker,” said Ana Alós on Tuesday, “because the company also has needs.” It must reconcile with its shareholders. As you remember that more than 90% of the “entrepreneurial fabric” is made up of SMEs and self-employed people, this implies that in this case conciliation will be more difficult, if not impossible, for workers.
With the idea of a “bank of hours” agreed between employers and workers and with which the latter could theoretically work four days, according to the idea of the PP, it suffices to recall what happens with overtime not paid in Spain. Concerning this fraud which reduces the family income of people who work beyond their hours, the PP has nothing to say. They will think that it does not affect conciliation or will simply pretend that it does not exist.
It didn’t take long for the government to scorn the PP’s new ideas. “It is ironic to hear the PP talk about conciliation,” said Pilar Alegría. “How Feijóo must have seen himself to want to take this turn. They remind me of the “what you buy and what you get” meme. Zero credibility.
The social turning point could end up looking like the mythical journey to the center that has been talked about for so long on the right. It may also be Feijóo’s way of forcing his party to get used to a long march. Shortly after the July elections, it was clear to the PP that we were facing “a short and difficult legislature”. A headline in El Mundo suggests that behind these new initiatives lies a dose of realism “in case Sánchez resists for three years”.
Neither the entire body of work of Stephen King, nor the eight Freddy Krueger films and twelve “Friday the 13th” films frighten the leaders of the People’s Party as much as this possibility. Conciliation? Anything before you resign yourself to such a terrifying prospect.
