It is possible for citizens to push through affairs to be debated in parliament; it’s just a question of collection half a million signatures…

One pressure group which is fighting evictions wanst the Central Government to change the law so that when somebody has their house repossessed by the bank, the debt is written off. At present, home owners not only lose the roof over their heads but are also destined to remain in debt for life to pay off the mortgage. The banks, which sometimes repossess the house for a pittance, then go on to sell them for much more on the market. It is highly questionable if not outright immoral.

So, the citizen pressure group not only managed to collect sufficient signatures but actually managed to collect three times the necessary number: 1.49m signatures. They triumphantly presented the lot before the Parliament.

The first reaction of the governing party, the Partido Popular, which enjoy a massive majority, was to vote against debating the affair. They had hoped that at least one other political party, no matter how minor, would join them but it wasn’t to be, mainly because just hours before the affair was to be voted on an elderly couple, facing eviction, committed suicide out of desperation. Any hope of finding an ally was lost. They knew that with there overwhelming majority they did not need anybody else to effectively block the vote but they realised that to do so would be devastating for them.

Things had been made worse by the fact that another pressure group had collected the minimum amounts of votes necessary to propose that the Parliament debated making bull fighting a protected institution. The Partido Popular had already announced that they would be supporting it, together with the main opposition party, the PSOE.

So, they were facing the damning combination of heartily accepting a popular proposal backed by half a million signatures to protect bull fighting yet rejecting another popular proposal back by nearly 1.5m signatures, to stop people losing their homes and facing a life of destitution as a debtor.

Even the Partido Popular realised that they could not possibly attempt this, so they backed down at the last moment, saying that they would not use their majority to block the proposal being debated.

This doesn’t mean that they won’t use that same majority to quash the motion in the final voting, but it was at least a victory for the Stop Deshaucios (evictions) movement and a brutal PR blunder by the Partido Popular for initially attempting to block it from being debated.

(News: Spain)