Credit to: Rubén Cantos Castelló

Credit to: Rubén Cantos Castelló

According to José Pérez, the Spanish political arena has just lost an important opportunity to ramp up the basic income concept deeply into local and national politics. What has been an idea of continuous growth since 2011 (mainly through social movements like 15M), has stalled for the moment as political parties prefer defending conditional grants instead. This is also fomented by traditional leftists, such as unions, who continue to look at full employment as the golden solution to social problems. Pérez considers the basic income idea a hard one to defend in today’s political arena, but a necessary one if the 1978 Constitutional Text is ever to be taken literally.

José Luis Rey Pérez, “La renta básica ante las elecciones del 20D, ¿una oportunidad perdida?” [“The basic income before the December 20 elections: a missed opportunity“], Sin Permiso magazine, October 30, 2015