Podemos is increasing pressure on the government and setting the conditions to maintain its support in Congress. “The citizens of our country, dear colleagues, have said enough. And if the citizens of our country have said enough, Podemos has said enough too. We say from here to the government, and I tell them very clearly, that if it wants the support of Podemos, it will have to sever trade relations with Israel, lower rents by law and put an end to speculation,” he said. warned the general. the party secretary, Ione Belarra, at the central event of the Autumn University.
With this sentence, the Podemos leader culminated the escalation of pressure against the executive of Pedro Sánchez that the party has undertaken in recent weeks. That same Monday, they assured that they were not a partner of the Government and affirmed that the president knew what was happening at the Ministry of Transport while the plot of the Koldo affair was developing. Today, they are setting the conditions to continue supporting him in Congress at a crucial moment, in the midst of negotiating the general state budgets which will surely mark the viability of the legislative body.
The party celebrates this weekend the Autumn University, an ideological forum which it usually takes advantage of to mark the political strategy at the start of the course, which coincides with the tenth anniversary of the first citizen assembly of the party, Vistalegre I. Between Saturday and on Sunday they will hold fifteen tables on current affairs at the Círculo de Bellas Artes, with international guests such as the former British Labor leader and MP Jeremy Corbyn or the Palestinian MEP and activist Rima Hassan, who participated in the event central.
During this event, which was also attended by the main faces of the party, Irene Montero, Isa Serra and Pablo Fernández, Podemos focused its political action on two main issues: the question of housing and the genocide in Israel. “We are witnessing the worst genocide in a century. A few days ago, they burned people living in a hospital under sheets. What’s the difference between that and burning people in gas chambers like the Nazis did, burning Jews, Nazis, people who thought like us,” Belarra said. “The only difference is that this time no one could say they didn’t know,” he added.
“The PP and the PSOE say they are very different but they both say that the genocidaires, the criminals, form a friendly state. Both support Europe’s military, economic, political and media complicity with the genocidaires, with the criminals, with the assassins. […] “Spain is a country capable of breaking diplomatic relations with Milei for an insult to President Sánchez, which are very well broken with this fascist, but it is not capable of breaking these diplomatic and commercial relations with the State of ‘Israel,’ he said. Montero said a few minutes earlier during his speech.
After this reflection, Belarra asked the government to break relations with the country of Benjamin Netanyahu. This is the first condition he set to continue supporting Sánchez in Congress. The second is that of housing, after a few weeks during which the surge in rental prices took precedence over public discourse.
“The mobilizations for housing mark a before and an after,” predicts Belarra, who attributes the situation to the result of decades of policies of the PP and PSOE, which she described as “authentic lackeys of speculators”. “We need to get the houses out of commission, off the market. The right to housing must be guaranteed as a human right. Houses are for living. “The people have said enough and Podemos has said enough,” concluded the Podemos leader.
“The government is proposing the return of bipartisanship”
In her speech, Irene Montero took the opportunity to reinforce the thesis that the party has maintained since the summer and which affirms that a return to bipartisanship is being prepared. “In Spain, the power in place is proposing that the two-party system return and erase in one fell swoop these ten years of struggles,” he declared, then underlined the points on which, in his opinion, the PP and the PSOE agree, as in the Palestinian question.
“Look at everything we do to continue to trade with the genocidaires. “We bring products made in territories illegally occupied by genocidaires in Palestine, but we put a label on them so you can decide if you are buying products that are the result of illegal occupation and that bring pain, injustice and murder “, he criticized Montero in a message addressed, without naming him, to the Minister of Social Rights, Pablo Bustinduy. The minister, who is part of the Sumar quota, a few days ago asked companies that import products from this Middle Eastern country to indicate this on their labels.
“Both sell citizens’ public assets to Black Rock, to these large investment funds. They are both in institutions to defend rentiers, never to defend tenants, families, people who know that housing is a right and not an asset to speculate on,” he declared. “It would be different to ban vulture funds from buying houses because houses are a business. He who does business with a right is a thief. Why not lower property prices by law? Why not force these investment funds to put 50% of the houses they illegally hoard into social rental? It would be different. And it would be effective,” he suggests below.
He also took the opportunity to criticize corruption, just after a few weeks in which the judicial siege against José Luis Ábalos strengthened. “They say they’re very different, but when they’re in positions of power, they always have people willing to stick their hands in the box. They always have activists, colleagues and colleagues, ready to put their hands in the box. And there, you have people on this stage who fought to include the ceiling on rents, to have a good social shield while there were members of the Socialist Party, of the president of the government party, who put the money in the cash register.”, he reproached.
“Without pressure and noise, we have a reactionary and anti-democratic putschist right running this country, even if they do not govern. This is what Pedro Sánchez and his allies achieved by governing quietly,” Montero concluded in another criticism of Sumar and Yolanda Díaz, whom he did not mention directly at any point in his speech.
