Little mattered to the Galician left the explanations offered last Thursday, after the Consello, by the president of the Xunta, regarding the completion of the so-called Tarxeta Básica —reloadable prepaid card with an amount of 450, 600 or 900 euros per quarter in function of the composition of the family unit—, one of the measures that in its day was illuminated in San Caetano to face the impact of the coronavirus. “It was an exceptional measure adopted during the pandemic due to an exceptional situation,” recalled Alfonso Rueda, about those months in which many economic sectors could not even open their doors. That situation “right now, fortunately”, at least in terms of the “impossibility of working”, as precisely the June unemployment data confirms, “there is none”.
In short, “the exceptional situation is over, at least in that intensity, that measure is over.”
But the opposition has thought they saw a new vein there, another battering ram – not everything is going to be Health, seven days a week – and after crushing the idea in the Saturday-Sunday parenthesis, this Monday they returned to the fray. The socialist spokesman in the Parliament of Galicia, Luis Álvarez, appeared yesterday to announce that his group will register in the next plenary session in OHórreo, next week, an initiative to urge the regional government to “recover” this card, “from immediate way.”
Álvarez said that the “controversy” is still “alive” and “not overcome”, ignoring that they, together with the BNG, are the ones who are inciting it; and he accused the Xunta of a lack of “will”, blaming it for a refusal to invest just over 30 million euros and a little less than leaving more than 75,000 families lying around. Already put, he once again attributed to San Caetano a dynamic based solely on “twitching” and wearing down the Government, while “they worsen the situation of the most needy people.”
Minutes later, the deputy spokesman for the Popular Group Alberto Pazos used irony to answer a question along these lines, pointing out that the Basic Card “is not something we can do”, but “something we have already done”, and in one context, he abounded on the Rueda line last Thursday, “of enormous difficulty”, due to the pandemic.
The head of the Xunta also recalled, days ago, that the 50 million annual destined for the Risga, the thermal social bonus and “everything that is necessary” are still standing. Pazos also recalled it, who added in his argument the different aid that the sectors most in a hurry have been receiving due to the successive bumps, from the pandemic to inflation.
“The Xunta, in this sense, must be doing something right,” the popular deputy stressed this Monday, when “poverty rates are still below average,” as are families with severe deficiencies. “It looks like we’re getting the instruments right,” he added. He concluded by saying that the tools may “vary”, but the “commitment” to “combat poverty”, “this is permanent” and will continue “every day”.
