Montero points out that the impact of Holy Week "adds to the positive indicators" of March and augurs a good April

SEVILLA, 9 Abr. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The Deputy Secretary General of the PSOE and Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, stated this Easter Sunday that the activity linked to Holy Week "adds to the very positive indicators" harvested by the Spanish economy in March, predicting that the current The month of April will also provide "good employment and consumption data" and therefore good news for domestic economies and families, in the face of the "undocumented catastrophism" of the PP.

In statements to the media in Seville, Montero celebrated the impact of the tourist activity associated with Holy Week on the economy as a whole, which "adds to the very positive indicators" harvested in relation to the month of March.

In particular, he pointed out the employment data for the month of March, which resulted in 48,755 fewer official job applicants compared to the previous month (-1.67%), a drop in unemployment marked by the drop in unemployment in the service sector due to hiring for Holy Week, and which certainly follows the rise in unemployment in January and February.

It has also highlighted that in March, the average affiliation to Social Security exceeded 20.37 million people, "the highest figure in the series", according to the Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migrations.

To this "affiliate record", according to Montero, is added that the employment created is "increasingly of higher quality", since 46.82% of the contracts carried out in March were permanent, an extreme that he has attributed to the labor reform promoted by the central government of the PSOE and Unidas Podemos, which has "doubled the number of permanent contracts", in such a way that "four out of five" people with a job enjoy "a stable contract and possibilities of a life project".

It has also pointed out that in March, the total number of unemployed persons under 25 years of age stood at 215,099, its lowest figure in a month of March within the historical series, that is, "the lowest level of youth unemployment for 15 years", data all of them "far from temporary and precarious" implicit in the labor reform undertaken by the former executive of the popular Mariano Rajoy.

These data, according to the minister, encourage the coalition government to "continue working in that direction", as well as to continue "fighting inflation, which is a very important economic burden for families" and which the Spanish government is mitigating "in a more correct way" with respect to the rest of the European Union, as he has assured.

After Spain closed 2022 with the lowest inflation (5.5%) in the euro zone (9.2%) and the EU (10.4%), Montero pointed out that at this time, Spain is "the second country " in Europe with lower inflation "thanks to the price of energy", which in turn is the result of the 'Iberian exception', through which Spain and Portugal have been able to temporarily limit the price of gas for the production of electricity, thus achieving "the cheapest price in the European Union".

And after the price of food rose 16.6% year-on-year in February, its highest rise since 1994, according to the final data published this Tuesday by the National Institute of Statistics (INE); Montero has assured that the Government is going to "continue monitoring the prices of products to continue meeting the needs of companies and families", after the drop in VAT on certain food products.

In addition, he has predicted that the current month of April will also provide "good employment and consumption data" and therefore good news for domestic economies and families.

Faced with this, he has warned that the PP has not "raised its shoulder" either during the pandemic or in the energy and economic crisis derived from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In his opinion, the PP "has signed up for undocumented catastrophizing, with ominous forecasts without evidence, day in and day out, that have nothing to do with day-to-day reality."

According to the warning, the PP is "permanently staining Spain's reputation" because it is "convinced that only if the country is doing badly does it have the possibility of making political profit" from a situation that allows it to reach the government.