The third vice president of the Government of Navarra and minister of Housing, Youth and Migration Policies, Begoña Alfaro, expressed this Thursday her support for the general strike called for November 11 in defense of the right to housing, and conveyed her wish that it be "a total and absolute success".
Answering in the plenary session of the Parliament of Navarra to a question raised by Contigo-Zurekin, Alfaro welcomed the call and stressed that her assessment "can only be positive and, in addition to being positive, very necessary given the serious situation in which we find ourselves." In her words, "we fully support it and it is, furthermore, a sign of democratic maturity in our society. I hope it is a total and absolute success. I am glad that class unions have put housing at the very top of their priorities because this is a fight for a right that we consider absolutely essential and that has not always been part of the highest level of the political and social agenda. That is why I can only feel happy and congratulate myself on this issue".
The vice president warned that "we cannot be systematically fighting and achieving wage improvements or improvements in the economic conditions of workers, and that everything achieved ends up being paid for with exorbitant housing prices, because then what that will mean is a direct transfer from the pockets of workers to the pockets of landlords".
In relation to the legal framework, Alfaro recalled that "the strike, for the moment, is a constitutional right" and emphasized that "this Government can only support that this constitutional right is exercised with all guarantees, and I say for the moment because we cannot take any right for granted".
She also considered "social pressure, pressure in the street, to be fundamental, in order to create a favorable climate for the approval of ambitious public policies that manage to alleviate the situation faced by access to housing for many families". In her view, "it is essential to combine these two aspects, on the one hand social pressure and on the other public management, to achieve the structural changes necessary".
On the other hand, the spokesperson for Contigo-Zurekin, Carlos Guzmán, made "a call to the entire working majority in Navarra so that next day 11 the workplaces are emptied and we fill the streets to defend our rights".
Guzmán reproached that, in the face of the call for the strike, "the response of political, communicative and employer-rights forces has not taken long to come, a direct and furious attack on this collective right" and defended that, in view of this, the Government of Navarra "must not remain impassive" and has to stand "on the side of the working social majority".