Let the children come to Feijóo

What are the components of Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s brain? Without wishing to reach a scientific conclusion, we could venture that a quarter 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, although it is going through stages of low activity. The last quarter suffers for Venezuela, especially on specific dates, although they are willing to stop doing so if there is another issue that is more convenient for them.

The last three parts must now make room for a different concern. It is not unusual, but it is a novelty. Feijóo wants to be a good person and take care of those who need help. Have ideas about it. As they have to do with social spending, some media indicate that it would represent an incursion into the traditional territory of the left. To the famous question – is it that no one thinks about the children? – the leader of the PP is clear: me and no one but me.

Suddenly, his heart overflows with love. Before long, Miguel Tellado will start to look at you strangely while you clean the instruments made in Albacete. Boss, you’re not getting soft, are you?

Being the main opposition party forces us to choose a weak point in the Government every week to put pressure on it. There are issues that, due to their importance, last weeks or months on the agenda. The PP, not very addicted to innovation, could spend years banging on about the same thing. The improvement in the economic situation since 2021 left him without the possibility of attacking that flank, which forced him to focus on the same repertoire.

This Tuesday, his parliamentary group registered a conciliation law proposal in Congress and has not been stingy in praising himself. It is the “most ambitious law of democracy.” Among its measures, free nursery schools from zero to three years old, the extension of paternity and maternity leave, the recognition of single-parent families and the extension of their leave, and bonuses for hiring caregivers for large and single-parent families. .

In diagnosing the conciliation problem, the PP partly agrees with the analyzes made by the Government. As you might expect, there are big differences with the solutions. It seeks to eliminate the obligation to take the first six weeks of paternity leave in the case of the father.

This loses an advantage of the current situation: from the first moment, both spouses are jointly responsible for care. With the proposal, there is a risk that the man adapts the moment in which he begins the leave to the needs of the company. Maybe not voluntarily.

The reduction of working hours is another issue in which the PP has reacted suddenly as if it were another party. Instead of announcing that capitalism will die if it goes ahead, it accepts the idea in principle with relevant changes. It is not necessary to read even the fine print to verify that the reduction is not what workers will be expecting. In short, it consists of putting in more hours each day to be able to work fewer days a week, four instead of five. Therefore, the weekly working day would continue to be forty hours.

Not even this formula of working less to end up working the same will convince the PP of Madrid, guardian of Thatcherite essences. Four working days a week is anathema to Isabel Díaz Ayuso. You just have to check what he said in the Assembly to Más Madrid in 2021: “Citizens work more than you, that the only thing they propose at a time of reactivation of the Spanish economy is to work four days. Has the lazy Errejón come here to say that we have to work four days?” Ayuso hears the words ‘social turn’ and starts to get nervous and insult.

The PP also has ideas about 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 that it has been defending for decades. It proposes liberalizing more land in line with the law that was approved during the Government of José María Aznar. At that time they announced that prices would drop and what happened was the opposite. The price per square meter doubled between 1998 and 2005.

The left usually accuses this law of having led to the real estate bubble, although this misfortune had many parents and necessary collaborators, starting with financial entities and the Bank of Spain.

Free land and tax breaks for apartment owners who have not yet rented them out are the main current recipes of the PP. Nothing about speculation or extending measures to limit seasonal rentals throughout Spain. The PP – in addition to Vox and Junts – voted in Congress in September against putting them into effect.

The right does not believe that speculation exists, contrary to existing evidence, or that the market has turned housing into an investment good. That would give a bad image to businessmen and individuals for whom it is a big business and whom the PP wants to protect from any regulation that could harm them.

Both regarding conciliation and working hours, the PP establishes the business exception. “It has to be agreed between the company and the worker,” Ana Alós said on Tuesday, “because the company also has needs.” It must be reconciled with its shareholders. As you remember that more than 90% of “the business fabric” are SMEs and the self-employed, it assumes that in that case conciliation will be more difficult or impossible for workers.

With the idea of ​​a “bank of hours” agreed upon by employers and workers and with which the latter could work four days in theory, according to the idea of ​​PP, we only have to remember what happens with unpaid overtime in Spain. Regarding this fraud that reduces the family income of people who work beyond their hours, the PP has nothing to say. You will think that it does not affect conciliation or that you simply pretend that they do not exist.

It did not take long for the Government to disdain the new ideas of the PP. “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 turn may end up like the mythical journey to the center that was talked about on the right for so long. It may also happen that it is 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 tough legislature.” A headline from El Mundo suggests that behind these new initiatives there is a dose of realism “in case Sánchez resists three years.”

Neither all of Stephen King’s work nor the eight Freddy Krueger films and the twelve ‘Friday the 13th’ films scare the leaders of the Popular Party as much as that possibility. Conciliation? Anything before resigning yourself to such a terrifying prospect.