SPANISH STATE
Written by Corriente Roja – Madrid
Wednesday, 01 April 2015 16:48
The 2015 Spanish municipal and autonomic elections will be held on Sunday, 24 May 2015. In Madrid a coalition between Ganemos and Podemos is standing a candidate for the municipal election.
Today, Madrid is a city of evicted people by the police to give their homes to banks that were bailed out with millions of public euros. Of privatisation and degradation of city council services. Of the ERE (Legal mechanism of massive layoffs) in Madrid Río and of the ERTE (Similar to ERE) against gardeners and street sweepers. The city covered by air pollution and social unevennesswhere life expectancy is two years shorterfor inhabitants of a working class neighbourhood.
Faced with this reality, numerous demonstrations and strikes were held against such attacks and we have reached a situation where the PP as well as the PSOE [1] have to face a deep crisis of legitimacy and for the first time there is a possibility of ousting them from the Town Hall and the Autonomous Community.
Comrades from Corriente Roja [2] have been taking part of the meetings that finally led to the coalition Ganemos–Podemos. In a shared understanding, both organisations announce a “participative programme”, “proposed to public validation”, a candidacy elected in open primary elections and open electoral committees in the neighbourhoods. The purpose is to build a broad unity of most of the social and political actors hinging round that candidacy. As far as we are concerned the really important and decisive thing is to make sure that the proposals should tune with the most pressing needs of the toiling masses in Madrid.
– It is necessary to pose an emergency social plan to halt the evictions, assure electrical energy and heating for every family and that everybody can eat three times a day. The Autonomous Community has to generalise the Guaranteed Minimum Income [3] for all unemployed people who can’t receive unemployment benefits.
– It’s necessary to ally with the city council workers against layoffs and privatization of services to establish direct management and strengthening them. We must get rid of private companies and large construction companies that benefit directly from this privatization of public services at the expense of redundancies, ERES and ERTES against workers and against the services to the people of Madrid. We must stop outsourcing public services.
– We must end corruption and punish those who carried out the plunder of public land and have drawn profits from where they should not. We need to open accounts, establishing the participation of social movements, for example, by transforming the District Boards into Boards of popular participation.
– Municipal taxation has to be progressive: those who earn more have to pay more, eliminating all the special benefits for banks, corporations and the Church.
– Towards a sustainable transport system: defending the public character of the EMT and the Metro and ending with the current funding model imposed by the Transport Consortium, whose main beneficiaries are private companies.
– Furthermore we must set up a bike-sharing system at the expense of car transport and strengthen the public transport.
– We must ensure that not a single euro from the budgets of the Community is directed to private-concerted education. The same goes for health service. Education and health are not for profiteering.
– Stop the drama of sexist violence, The Town Hall and the Autonomic Community must strengthen the attention to abused women.
In order to achieve this, it is absolutely necessary to challenge the narrow autonomy allowed to municipal administrations today. Otherwise it would lead us to manage the scraps left by the Montoro plans and would prevent us from implementing any deeper policy favourable to the broad majority of the toiling population in Madrid.
That is why it is of vital importance to reject the so-called “Law of Sustainability and Local Government Rationality”, to stop the payment of the public debt and audit it so that the bulk of it can be declared illegitimate; it is also necessary to break the mega-contracts with the large construction companies.
We are perfectly aware that these measures would immediately set the central government on the warpath crying for “respect for the law” in order to prevent any policy that could be an alternative to its austerity policy. But we are also sure that the great majority of the working class in Madrid would defend with all their might a municipality and a Community who would dare to challenge Rajoy and the UE and apply measures that favour the poor.
Corriente Roja is aware that unfortunately the contents of the programme are not the centre found which the Ganemos-Podemos hinges. We shall continue expressing our opinions at all the joint forums of the candidature which we regard as central, the programme,.
Corriente Roja is aware that unfortunately the program contents are not the centre around which the coalitionGanemos-Podemos revolves. We will continue to give our opinions at all joint candidacy meetings about what we regard as central, the programme, because it is what determines whether there will be a real change.
The candidacy of Ganemos-Podemos has become a tool for ousting the PP administration from Madrid without opening the gates for the PSOE. That is why we took part in the meetings prior to its formation and we shall ask the workers to vote for this candidate in the upcoming municipal elections.
Finally, we wish to state our disagreement with both the regional leaderships of Podemos and Izquierda Unida (IU) [4]. The way things are at present, with the possibility of winning over the PP and PSOE in the elections – something that has been the battle cry coming from the streets these last years – the attitude of the regional leadership of the IU in the municipal election as well as of Podemos in the Community election is unacceptable. They refuse to go for the unity or severely hamper it. We must have a unitary candidacy also for the autonomic elections!
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Notes:
[1] – PP: Partido Popular (Popular Party), a traditional bourgeois rightist party; PSOE: Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Spanish Workers and Socialist Party), founded in 1879 and member of the II International.
[2] – Corriente Roja (Red Trend), IWL-FI’s section in the Spanish State.
[3] – Guaranteed Minimum Incomeis a systemofsocial welfare provisionthat guarantees that allfamilieshave an income sufficient to live on, provided they meet certain conditions.
[4] – Izquierda Unida (Left Unity): a coalition led by the Spanish Communist Party.