Political escapism with the reduction of the working day

Díaz's insistence on launching his workday reduction without support seeks to curry favor with the unions.

Despite the glaring lack of parliamentary support it suffers, the government continues to insist on announcing plans as if it were ready to approve them. Proof that such a move is not feasible would be the solution devised by Moncloa to increase defense spending to 2% of GDP without submitting it to a vote in the Congress of Deputies, where several of its allies (Sumar, ERC, Bildu, Podemos, and BNG) have already warned it that they would vote against it.

Pedro Sánchez will seek to fulfill this commitment to NATO by reallocating resources from some underutilized budget items, from plans financed with European funds, and thanks to the lower cost of debt interest compared to the forecast included in the 2023 Public Accounts, which the Executive operates with after having extended them twice consecutively, something unprecedented in democracy. However, the latest update of the volume of defense spending measured as a percentage of GDP for each of the members of the Atlantic Alliance has revealed an additional requirement of €3 billion for our country, which will force the president to seek new ways to reach the goal set by this organization for collective security.

Moncloa is encountering even more difficulties in pushing forward Yolanda Díaz's flagship project for the current term: the forced reduction of the maximum working day. Because, as of today, all business organizations, even those aligned with the government, reject a measure that would once again skyrocket labor costs for companies, especially SMEs, at a time of great global uncertainty. CEOE believes this maneuver torpedoes collective bargaining and will harm employment, while the Catalan employers' association Foment is calling on the various groups in Parliament to present a comprehensive amendment to reject the project outright.

In addition to the opposition parties (PP and Vox), parties such as Junts and the PNV (Basque Nationalist Party) refuse to support this measure without the endorsement of social stakeholders. In this situation, the announcement by the Vice President and Minister of Labor that the Council of Ministers will approve the decree-mandated reduction of the maximum working day next week can only be explained by Díaz's desire to curry favor with the CCOO and UGT unions ahead of the May Day protests.