PP Corruption and 51% of Pensions Below Minimum Wage

PP Corruption and 51% of Pensions Below Minimum Wage

How many Spaniards earn less than the legal minimum wage? The official answer from then-Employment Minister Fátima Báñez was that "no one in Spain earns below the minimum wage" because "it would be illegal." But figures from her own Ministry at the end of 2016 told a different story: over five million pensioners, 51% of the total, earned less than 707.6 euros per month. Among them, seven in ten were women.

This contradiction is not a cabinet detail. It is a snapshot of two things at once: how elderly poverty is measured and how casually data in your own records is denied. From there, the issue opens in several directions: the deterioration of employment, the hole in Social Security, and corruption that left names, companies, and Swiss accounts in its wake.

51% of Pensioners Below Minimum Wage

The circulating calculation was merciless: 5,000,000 pensioners earned less than the Interprofessional Minimum Wage. Among those earning below that line, 3,399,712 were women, seven in ten. The reading was double: on one hand, half the cohort lives in what many describe without nuance as poverty; on the other, the pension system perpetuates a gender gap that begins long before, in careers and salaries.

The time frame matters. We are in December 2016, with the Government boasting of growth while the pension fund was emptying. The Social Security Reserve Fund was used to cover the settlement of 936 million in income tax refunds for pensioners, an amount added to the 9.5 billion already available on December 1. The uncomfortable conclusion was that the cushion was being spent paying current payrolls.

Salaries of 300 Euros: The Labor Reform That Fragmented Employment

The other front was employment. In 2016, according to available data, one in two Spaniards with a job earned less than 900 euros per month, and one in three, less than 300. 22% of workers already earned below those 300 euros. This reading is supported by Rajoy and Báñez's labor reform, which turned contracts into flexible, disposable tools, with workers who do not make ends meet and who do not accumulate rights for unemployment or pensions.

Regarding unemployment, the repeated figure was another: unemployment protection covered fewer and fewer people. The coverage rate had fallen half a point in a year, and 47% of the unemployed received no benefits. With an unemployment rate of 21%, the portrait drawn placed Spain as the second poorest country in the EU, only behind Romania, according to the European report on employment and social development cited.

Supplements, Cajas B, and 3% of Contracts

As the conversation advanced, the focus shifted from social figures to the party's opaque accounting. Episodes accumulated: the Civil Guard investigating a Cajas B of the PP in Madrid that operated between 2010 and 2014, businessmen confessing illegal financing, donations that paid for a rally, and the trail of so-called supplements. The Prosecutor's Office, according to cited chronicles, pointed to dozens of defendants in various schemes.

One of the most repeated arguments was statistical: 12 of the 14 ministers of José María Aznar's governments are under indictment, and Mariano Rajoy was part of those cabinets. Meanwhile, the thesis circulated (not definitively proven) that Rajoy had received supplements until 2011, trinc what some media published about his testimony before the court. Regarding the former autonomous president Ignacio González, it was reported that he hid a Swiss account from the Justice System, which would have kept him away from a candidacy.

A Prosecutor's Office That Halts Corruption

Another line, more structural, argues that the problem lies not in isolated cases but in who watches. It is pointed out that the PP placed officials affiliated with it in charge of the anti-corruption prosecutor's office and the General Prosecutor's Office, and that the Prosecutor's Office itself attempted to cover up investigations in a dozen cases. The appointment of a leader with a questionable past to head an anti-corruption office was read as the perfect metaphor: putting the wolf in charge of the chickens.

In 2017, a figure reinforcing the suspicion of impunity was recorded: almost one in four pardons granted that year fell on those convicted of corruption. For those trinc the issue, the pattern was clear: operations advance, indictments add up, and in the end, justice arrives late or not at all.

Lezo, Púnica, and Gürtel: The Map of Operations

The accumulated chronology was long. Operation Púnica, with a suspected Cajas B of the PP in Madrid; Lezo, which put up to four golf courses attributed to Esperanza Aguirre under the microscope; Gürtel, the mother case, with Rajoy's testimony via videoconference; and the UCO concluding that Indra had diverted 600,000 euros in public funds to the PP through shell companies. Each operation added a new name to the list.

The response from the other side was not always denialist. There were also those who accepted corruption and relativized it: better these than the others, even if they steal ten times more. This pragmatism coexists with scandal without much friction. And so, between resignations that do not come and cases that drag on, the issue remains open without anyone having closed the party's accounting.