Speeches

Mr President, Commissioner, we cannot align ourselves with the interests of large industries and abandon those who have sustained our nations: farmers, winners and fishermen. The agreement with Mercosur condemns the Spanish primary sector to compete in inequality. Can you imagine for a moment that from January 1 your annual salary will be limited to twenty-seven days worked? Our salary would be about 7 400 euros. Well, distinguished companions, this is what is being demanded of the fishermen: that they live with alms, also paying for new networks and fired diesel and enduring an impossible bureaucracy. Brussels, what's next? They are suffocating our villages and condemning rural Spain to disappear. Europe cannot be sustainable if we destroy its roots. But of course, what can we expect? We don't see our colleagues on the left talking about the primary sector. For them the only important thing is gender quotas. Where will the Ministry of Equality be when farmers and fishermen see how villages are left empty and without opportunities? The only equality they are offered is to disappear together.

Mr President, how are we going to have affordable housing in Spain if the municipalities, the autonomous communities and the State are the main vulture housing funds, the ones that really make it more expensive, and not private activity? Housing must no longer be the source of funding for administrations. In Spain, 32% of the price of housing is land and 25% are taxes: municipal taxes, regional taxes, licenses, state taxes ... It is more than half the price that goes directly to public administrations, which need all this financing to support their structure; This is without counting on the speculation of municipal land, which degenerates into political corruption in most cases. And is that, in Spain, unlike in the rest of Europe, we lead the ranking of countries that have more municipalities and, far from merging and reducing municipalities, we have expanded them. Administrations are more efficient when there is cohesion. We need to address all these problems urgently by encouraging private initiatives in the sector with effective strategies. The mandatory merger of municipalities in Spain is the pending issue.

Mr. President, you're talking about the housing problem. Is it logical that they want to make Europe the home of millions of Africans, while Europeans have no home in which to develop their lives? Lighten up. In some of the cities of Spain, young people and families live in caravans, zulos or balconies for not being able to pay or rent one and we have the biggest crisis of illegal occupation in our history. Meanwhile, European tourists who invest in Spanish housing further aggravate the solution and the problem. There are already areas in Spain, such as the Canary Islands, Malaga or the Balearic Islands, in which three out of four homes are acquired by foreigners and that is a problem for their citizens. Just so far in 2024, the price of housing in Spain has soared twice as much as in the euro zone and more than 35% of the price is taxed. The Bank of Spain says that 600,000 homes are needed until 2025 to fill the housing deficit in our country, despite the fact that there are almost four million empty or unoccupied homes due to the legal uncertainty to which they are subjecting the owners. Therefore, we call on the European Commission, in its announced "affordable housing plan", to stop housing being the collection fund of public administrations and to protect access to housing for natives in areas of high demand.