Social organizations and political parties form a common front in Parliament for the right to decent housing

Esquerra Republicana has closed ranks with the fair housing movement to defend the Catalan law limiting rents after the Spanish government leaked to the press that it intended to contest the law before Spain’s Constitutional Court, whereby it would be immediately suspended. “Challenging it is politically shameful and socially unjustifiable,” said the Member of the Catalan Parliament (MCP) for Esquerra Pau Morales at a press conference organized by the Sindicat de Llogateres tenants’ union in front of the Parliament, in which eight other entities took part, including Omnium Cultural and the Plataforma Afectats per les Hipoteques – the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages, and Esquerra, centre-right Junts, and leftist parties CUP and Comuns, the four parliamentary groups that backed the law.

“It is a law based on the competences of the Catalan Generalitat government, as provided by the Home Rule Statutes, on matters of housing and civil law that has been in force for nine months and has shown that it improves the living conditions of many people,” said Mr Morales. “Without reducing supply, rental prices are falling, even beyond the most price-stressed municipalities,” he said.

Unfortunately however, Spain is once again attempting to overturn a republican law: “We are once again faced with Spain’s recurring vice of violating the rights of the citizens, falling back on sham constitutionalism, even in this case, of a law that they themselves had promised to introduce,” denounced Morales. And they are going back on it just as there is a “peak housing crisis”, on the eve of 9 August, the date on which the current moratorium on evictions will expire, he warned.

For the Esquerra MCP, this threat makes clear that “all they want to do is suspend the application of the law; and if they contest it, it is because it functions, because in Catalonia we have parliamentary majorities that legislate and put forward useful, transformational policies to guarantee the rights of the citizens.”

Faced with the fact that the Spanish government “will neither do, nor will it allow others to do,” Mr Morales asserted that, “from here on, we will continue to defend what is a fully effective and useful law; we will continue to defend the sovereignty of the Parliament of Catalonia, and above all, we will defend the right to decent housing, which is what the people of this country deserve.”