MADRID – Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, on Sunday announced a new social support package with mechanisms to curb food prices. The government plans to adopt the measures this year.
‘We are going to use all our resources, as we did during the pandemic, to serve the people,’ Sánchez said. Details of the measures were not given by the government, welcome though they are. An expensive Christmas period awaits, Spanish consumer organisation OCU has already identified increases of up to 5% in the shopping basket.
Inflation curve reversed
Speaking at an event in Barcelona of the socialist party PSC, Sánchez reported that his government has managed to “reverse the inflation curve” in Spain, thanks to the so-called “Iberian solution” to control energy prices and cut VAT.
He announced that before the end of the year, the government will approve a ‘new support package’ aimed at the country’s ‘social majority’ that will include ‘mechanisms to control the development of food prices’, although he did not give more details about the plans.
Vice president and labour minister Yolanda Díaz announced this week that her party is negotiating new measures with the PSOE to tackle rising food and mortgage prices. This comes as part of the extension of the anti-crisis decree that expires on 31 December, but without specifying what those measures would consist of.
The service of the people
‘We are going to put all our resources, as we did during the pandemic, at the service of the population,’ Pedro Sánchez said on Sunday, explaining that he values this idea ‘not only out of social commitment, but also out of economic efficiency’.
In this sense, he stressed that he managed to return Spain to its pre-pandemic employment levels in two years, while with the ‘neoliberal formulas’ he said it took 10 years to reverse the destruction of jobs caused by the 2008 economic crisis.
‘We are the only political apparatus that looks to the future and also responds to the problems of the present,’ Sánchez proclaimed.
