The government issues the 20% guarantee of the mortgage without going through Congress

The government maintains its strategy of make housing the axis of the electoral campaign. After losing ground for a week, due to the institutional clash of May 2 between Minister Félix Bolaños and the President of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso; the executive has once again marked the agenda with two announcements over the past weekend which, once again, pivot the public debate on an issue favorable to their interests.

The announcement by the President of the Government on Sunday in Tenerife advancing the approval of an ICO guarantee line to cover up to 20% of the mortgage for young people and families with dependent children has generated significant unease among partners inside and outside the coalition. As on previous occasions, Sánchez kept United We Can on the sidelines of the decision approved today by the Council of Ministers of which they are part. Although the violets and even the second vice-president, Yolanda Díaz, have publicly expressed their rejection of the terms of the measure, the truth is that when drawing up the meeting this morning at the Palacio de la Moncloa, government sources assure that they did not speak out against it.

Thus, despite their disagreement, the line of guarantees has received the green light from the government and that will be enough. This is what they say of Moncloa, which points out that the decision was adopted by “Council of Ministers agreement” which authorizes the Ministry to sign an agreement with the Official Credit Institute (ICO). A formula which is used when it is not necessary to articulate a decree-law and which makes it possible to circumvent the parliamentary process, that is to say the initiative will not go through the Congress of Deputies, where the numbers to move forward were complicated, due to the resounding refusal of its partners, if not with the support of the PP. A PP who continues to accuse Sánchez of having copied the measure and that he had already foreseen that “if it was copied well” they would approve it.

Within the executive, they dismiss the controversy and ignore the criticisms of their partners, who they fall within the purely electoral context. They defend that what was promoted by Sánchez is a “very ambitious package” of measures in which “the whole industry is involved” and they remind them that a month ago “we didn’t even have a housing law”. “We based the law on concrete measures to make housing a real and effective right,” they say government sources, which list the various commitments made by the president in his last speeches. In the Moncloa they point out that it is the banks that bear the risk of the operation, since they are obliged to finance 80% of the credit, and they accuse the PP of following suit and differentiating between the proposals elections and government decision-making.

However, the arguments of the socialist party do not convince the second vice-president, Yolanda Díaz, who understands that this measure will in the sense of an “unjust and ineffective policy” which has been followed for years, subsidizing housing as a financial product, an unfair and ineffective policy. “Today we see its results: soaring house prices and rents, and an unbearable increase in mortgage payments. due to rising interest rateswrote in a thread on his Twitter account.

In Moncloa they respond that it is not an expired proposal and claim that citizens are also interested in buying houses, beyond the guarantee of social rent. The aforementioned government sources argue that the measure had “a very good receptivity”. “In the street, people ask a lot,” they say.