TOGETHER: a boss match, owners and xenophobic
By Gérard Florenson
When voting in Parliament with the PP and VOX, JUNTS deputies prevented the approval of the bill that regulates temporary rentals. This vote was sometimes presented as a simple warning to Sánchez about the limits of support for JUNTS, essential support for the continuity of the “progressive” government, with blackmail to obtain more concessions in the negotiations on the different files related to the autonomy of Catalonia. We can add that JUNTS thus appears more “combative” than ERC, that agrees with the PSOE.
All this is true but insufficient: the content of the bill that JUNTS helped paralyze is not neutral. Responded to a petition from tenant unions who denounce the proliferation of temporary rentals, rentals for a few months that allow owners not to sign traditional lease contracts and be able to increase rents as they wish. The city of Barcelona, where this system is combined with the shortage of housing for tourist rentals to cause the dizzying rise in prices, is especially affected and the Catalan tenant unions were logically involved in demanding the limitation of this type of rental..
JUNTS has made its decision: preserve the interests of Catalan owners (who also oppose the timid limitation of profitable tourist rentals) to the detriment of the legitimate demands of the tenants. This clear class choice recalls the politics of La Liga, this distant ancestor of the JUNTS, what in 1934 had supported the landowners organized in the Catalan Institute of Agriculture Saint Ignace, to violate a law that in a certain way defended the Rabassaires, farmers of the squeezed wine sector. for rent. The Catalan right is always on the side of the rich…
JUNTS denies being the party of the Catalan bourgeoisie, emphasizing that it made the decision (a little forced) to support the “socialist” Salvador Illa to restore the political stability essential to his affairs, after having supported Rajoy to punish the separatists. As we indicated in one of our previous articles, It is true that the JUNTS is currently a bourgeois party that the Catalan bourgeoisie, scared by the consequences of politics in the adventurous eyes of Puigdemont, no longer recognizes as his party: But what we see is the desire of JUNTS to give him the means to recover the place that was his in the times of Pujol and then of Mas.
Pattern Match, owners party, JUNTS also slides towards xenophobia. His request to give Catalonia control of immigration policy makes complete sense when we discuss “multiple repeat offenders” to be expelled., terminology also used by the PP and VOX. How can we not expel Spanish citizens, It is the foreigners who are singled out and it does not take much to find the propaganda of the extreme right equating immigration and crime. Concerned about the competition of the Catalan Alliance – which its elected representatives also allowed through their abstention to win and retain the municipality of Ripoll – the JUNTS leaders trivialize the xenophobic discourse in the hope of winning votes.
So, all together, bourgeois and proletarians, exploiters and exploited, by Catalonia? The moment JUNTS takes off the mask, we must show its nature and its politics to better combat the illusions about an unthinkable unity.
