Carlos Hernández Quero He seems like a solvent politician to me. When he speaks, the classic empty party arguments do not resonate, the usual hollow sounds that flood our public debate.
The emphasis on housing, one of the most pressing concerns and material shortcomings of the Spanish people, that the Vox deputy has been placing in recent times, closely related to his academic research, seems to me to be a discursive success and a winning political strategy.
For the first time, Vox not only crudely attacks “what woke“, “the progressives” and “the social-communist left”, in a large mixed bag where objective ravings of the official left coexist alongside a collection of ideological prejudices, half-truths, specious deductions and contradictions as difficult to navigate as those of Pablo Iglesias.
For the first time, a moderately consistent reference to “social justice” appears in Vox. If that matters to you, to be credible We must begin to put the emphasis of criticism on the right of money and investment funds.
From here, it is necessary to specify such gaseous concepts, lowering them to the level of reality that occupies and worries millions of Spaniards to verify the ultimate consistency of the defense of social justice by this new radical or identity right.
As the deputy and brand new parliamentary spokesperson for Vox often remembers, Housing is not an island isolated from many other aspects of social or economic policy.
The new deputy spokesperson for Vox in Congress, Carlos Hernández Quero, during an event on housing.
Flickr / VOX Congress
Undoubtedly, uncontrolled or unregulated migratory flows exert significant pressure on the demand for housing, especially in some demographically overloaded population centers, which aspire to be, or in fact They are now global cities, with a clear insertion in the great financial and economic dynamics of a multinational dimension.
The free movement of people is the logical correlate of capitalist globalization, of the progressive dilution of national sovereignty in a large global market with diminishing rulesdeficient regulation and a progressive triumph of the triumphant neoliberal ideology from the eighties of the twentieth century: contestation of the post-war social democratic-Keynesian State, after the important oil crisis, in its productive, regulatory and redistributive facets.
The free movement of people does not appear as a democratic formula for emancipation, but rather as a way of proliferating cheap labor for the generalized impoverishment of workers and the correlative maximization of the profitability of capital.
Here is the main objection that we must make to Comrade Quero and his party. Global capitalism and neoliberal globalization have been validated by a certain orthodox vision of economic policy that, in its main aspects, Vox continues to defend with total and absolute enjoyment.
In terms of pensions, the identity right continues to bet on the Chilean Pinochet formula consisting of betting on a capitalization system, towards which it will gradually move from a mixed formula between distribution and personal savings.
Capitalization is still an alleged model of private or personal savings, behind which is the powerful lobby banking, oh surprise, and the same money right towards which Comrade Quero and his co-religionists now seem to direct their vituperations.
While some of them emphasize material precariousness, based on very poor salaries and exploitative working conditions (those extremely precarious jobs that Mrs. Ayuso and the neoliberal right seem to want to reserve for immigrants, in another unprecedented exercise of classism on the part of those who see people as mere labor force), they applaud the idea of financial entities to continue expanding the profitability of their businesses based on a chimera.
“Now that Comrade Quero and his companions address housing policy, it is worth asking whether the so-called defense of social justice is not contradicted by facts”
The same one that consists of thinking that private savings can replace a pay-as-you-go system, not devoid of dysfunctions, when such a budget is completely unrealistic for the vast majority of the Spanish population, who lives day to day, with just enough, without the ability to even cover their most basic material needs.
When the (pretended) right of social justice forgets about it in terms of pensions, some could attribute it to a major oversight due to its old orientation, the one that until fifteen minutes ago was designed by neoliberal economists, some close to the Austrian School, who directed the green ship on the same orthodox and antisocial path that global capitalism has followed for decades, from nerve centers of power like the Troika or admonitions like those of the Consensus of Washington.
But it’s not an oversight. It is a genuinely contradictory artifact, designed to combine rhetoric and essence that are diametrically opposed, opposite and antagonistic.
Now that Comrade Quero and his companions address housing policy with a special emphasis on taxes for the purchase of housing (VAT on new construction, ITP on second-hand) one might wonder if the so-called defense of social justice, once again, is not contradicted by the facts.
Pilar Alegría and Isabel Rodríguez, Minister of Housing, in some works in Zaragoza
Zaragoza City Council
The true progressive taxes on the concentration of property in a few hands, an ambition that conservatives who aim to distribute property are supposed to have, are those that tax the general wealth of people: IRPF, especially with regard to capital income, Wealth Tax (the Tax on Great Fortunes is a tax bungling that arises as a result of the de facto elimination of that tax after its normative transfer to the CCAA) and Inheritance and Donation Tax.
Well, today Vox remains committed to guaranteeing that whoever has an estate of several million euros enjoys important tax exemptions and that whoever inherits a handful of properties in a luxury neighborhood is treated extremely favorably. and, comparatively, in a more accommodating way than someone who inherits a modest apartment in Villaverde or Vallecas.
The old trick of promising tax cuts without being able to differentiate direct or indirect taxes, progressive or proportional taxes (and with regressive effects) is usually effective and sticks, due to the deplorable level of public debate.
But he is still a cheater.
At the moment of truth, if one stops with a minimum of rigor to analyze the economic and fiscal policy that the (supposedly) sovereigntists continue to promote, one realizes that the applause for mercy in Viva they are not the product of a superlative oversight or an ideological hindrance, but of the classic strategy of the parties catch-alltry to make the electoral space profitable by defending, if necessary, one thing and its opposite.
One last reminder. The left and right voices, a direct inheritance of modernity, appealed to the privileges of origin, those characteristic of class society, of an Old Regime full of privileges.
The linear progress towards the future, uninterrupted and childish, is as idealistic and utopian as the regression to a supposedly bucolic, falsely syrupy past.
Such a strategy responds, in essence, to the same operation of marketing that characterizes the politics of postmodernity. Wanting to tell us that a certain intellectual solvency, seasoned with a casual and culturally punk aesthetic, can melt Trump and Milei in a digestible pastiche.
As if the so-called patriotism of Comrade Quero and his acolytes did not falter when they paid homage to Sheriff Trump and the criminal. Netanyahuclose friends of Morocco, the main geopolitical threat to our national sovereignty.
As if the Spanish identitarian right did not still have to explain the reason for its lukewarmness in responding to strange traveling companions, who hate Spain, like orioles.
As if social justice and the mercantilist inertia of a right that has been converted to the Thatcherite faith for decades and given over to openly antisocial platitudes could be defended simultaneously, without anyone noticing.
*** Guillermo del Valle is a lawyer and general secretary of the Spanish Left.