economy and politics

Sánchez declares war on bankers and energy companies

Sánchez declares war on bankers and energy companies

Luis XIV, better known as “the sun king”, declared himself an admirer of the neck tie that preceded what we know today as a tie and Pedro Sánchez has just gotten rid of it. The President of the Government has given free rein to ministers and officials so that they can use it only when they consider it strictly necessary. It is not written that it was mandatory and it is not scientifically proven that if men take off their clothing the temperature of the buildings can be raised, but he left it there as a sign of his commitment to essential energy savings in times of a war that has disrupted Russian gas flows and predicts sooner rather than later restrictions in Europe.

Coincidence or not, the use of the tie had its origin in Croatia during the Thirty Years’ War, when women tied a red handkerchief around the soldiers’ necks as a symbol of love, and now, another fight is the excuse to untie . In Moncloa they defend that the president’s gesture, during the appearance in which he took stock of the political course, was only a wake-up call to raise awareness of the importance of the urgent energy saving plan that the Council of Ministers will approve on Monday. But, in reality, there were several male members of the government in the room who, like the president, dispensed with the noose around their necks in what could well be called the rebellion of the untied against “the lords of the cigars” – to whom Sánchez himself referred in a recent interview – and in accordance with the strategic line set out by Sánchez, who seeks a fair redistribution of the burdens of the crisis.

Pedro Sánchez has declared a war that he believes is fair for bankers and energy companies so that they contribute part of their income to the common fund through a temporary and extraordinary tax for the years 2023 and 2024. “If Mrs. Botín and Mr. Galán protest is that we are going in the right direction. If you look, they are the same as when we approved the Interprofessional Minimum Wage or the labor reform, they said that Spain was going to fall and that employment was going to be expelled, and the opposite has happened,” he said, referring to the president of the Bank. de Santander and the president and CEO of Iberdrola and their resounding protest against the new tax. “The president has drawn a line and it was they who have declared war on the government,” they say in Moncloa due to the announcement by energy companies and banks that they will go to court to knock down the tax on what, in government sources, is considered “a sign of imprudence”.

Banks will pay 4.8% of their income for interest and commissions while the large energy companies will contribute 1.2% of their total income this year and next. And they are so sure that no citizen will shed a tear over the tax that they believe that financial and energy entities “are not properly measuring the response of the street” to a tax that is already in force in more than a dozen European countries. with not exactly socialist governments.

The qualitative data handled in Moncloa maintains that 90% of citizens support the government’s decision. Protecting and advancing are the verbs that the president intends to conjugate in the remainder of the legislature so that this crisis, which promises turbulence, is not “paid for by the usual ones, but rather that there is a greater contribution from the large corporations that have increased their profits at the cost of rising prices.

La Moncloa designed an orderly and very defined strategy, after the socialist catastrophe of 19J in the Andalusian elections, with a greater presence in the streets and in the media of a much more ideological and close president who closes the course without euphoria and without flinching from the catastrophism drawn by the right and politics and media.

After a period of turbulence with its coalition partners and parliamentary allies, its strategists defend having “managed to lift the nose of the plane” and resume flight with “the NATO summit, which was a country success; with the debate of the Nation, which went reasonably well; and with the reconstruction of ties with the allies of the Catalan independence movement”, after the Pegasus crisis. And this in front of an opposition leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo who, in the eyes of monclovitas“it seemed one thing and has turned out to be another”.

“The topics are not known, it is a succession of commonplaces and it has threaded the same catastrophic discourse of Pablo Casado in which, like his predecessor, he uses data that is false”, they add about Feijóo in La Moncloa, where the drawing they make of Sánchez is radically opposed to that of his main adversary “both because of his international profile and because of his mastery of national problems.”

The Government is convinced that this semester a definitive boost has been given to the legislature and dispelled suspicions about an electoral advance. Breaking with the framework of the change of cycle installed by the right is another matter, but for now Sánchez announces his willingness to bend the polls, which are adverse to him. Thus he dismissed the course, after also announcing that he will propose a reform of the energy market at the next European Council to decouple the price of gas from the rate and to set a maximum limit for the price of CO₂ emissions. And, incidentally, clarify that despite speculation about the general elections, they will not be beyond December 2023. The appointment with the polls will be when it is constitutional and, without a priori changes in his cabinet, with which he said he was “ very comfortable and satisfied”. This is how he was also seen in his newly released role of untie.

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