Armengol despairs between Sánchez's brake on his housing plan and the pressure of his partners

• The plan.

  Veto free sale of houses to non-residents.

• Testimonials.

  Those affected speak: "It's crazy, we are not the problem"

The housing policy opens a

and one of its baronesses, the Balearic president Francina Armengol.

And it does so at a doubly sensitive moment: three months after the regional elections and just when the price of housing in the Balearic Islands reaches all-time highs, overheating the sector to levels not seen since the months prior to the bursting of the housing bubble, in 2007.

The staging of the divergence between Ferraz's socialists and their Balearic co-religionists has occurred in recent weeks around two episodes with the same common denominator.

Armengol's claim, encouraged by his government partners,

with two controversial measures aimed at limiting the free sale of homes and limiting the rental price.

The first political proposal, assumed by the Balearic PSOE and by Armengol itself, involves establishing a possible restriction on the purchase of homes by non-residents in Balearic territory.

The idea (at the moment a mere declaration of intent) was promoted by Podemos and has raised a fiery controversy, putting the real estate sector on alert.

In a letter sent a few weeks ago to two Podemos deputies in the Balearic Islands,

with the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU and that discriminatory measures cannot be promoted.

The second proposal, rejected on Tuesday in Congress with the PSOE voting against, was intended to ensure that the autonomous community chaired by Armengol has the power to regulate and limit rental prices

certain areas.

Promoting for this a modification in the Law of Urban Leases.

This second measure did not come from the Balearic PSOE (PSIB) but it did have the explicit support and favorable votes of the Socialists in the Balearic Parliament.

The proposal, articulated as a bill, was submitted to the autonomous chamber at the end of last year by one of the external allies of the PSIB, the

party Més per Menorca.

Armengol and his government partners from Més per Mallorca and Unidas Podemos supported him, transferring the debate to the Congress of Deputies.

Congress has voted this week

take the proposal into consideration.

And already in Madrid, the initiative has been rejected with the vote against the PSOE, which has thus shown its official distancing from the measures that Armengol supports in the Balearic Islands and that come from its minority government partners, to which the Balearic socialist leader need to govern.

The proximity of the elections and the ineffectiveness of housing policies to stop the escalation of prices in recent years (Armengol came to power in 2015) have led the Government parties to propose interventionist measures that are difficult to travel to avoid "speculation » and the upward pressure on prices, in what the opposition (PP, Cs, Vox) calls a

housing law

The version of the national PSOE on the limitation of rental prices, offered precisely by the Mallorcan deputy

, is that the measure is "unnecessary" because it will be covered under the "umbrella" of the future Housing Law, a norm still not approved and bogged down in its legislative process.

It was this delay that led the Balearic nationalists to promote the debate at the end of last year in the Islands, with the express support of the PSIB, which welcomed imposing a ceiling on rents and taking the matter to Congress, thus avoiding offending their strategic partners at the gates of the elections and putting

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