PP Pledges No Income Tax in First Year of a First Job Before Nov. 29
PP leader Feijóo repeated a pledge of no IRPF in the first year of a first job, with cuts of 75%, 50% and 25% after. Also: the Hernani attack.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the PP (Partido Popular, one of Spain’s two main parties), repeated on Sunday a campaign pledge that young people would pay no income tax in the first year of their first job. He spoke at a rally in Santander ahead of the general election on Nov. 29, El País reported.
At the same event he announced an extra campaign stop in Gipuzkoa, where the party’s candidate for Congress says he and other young members were attacked on Saturday.
What the PP tax pledge says
The measure is part of the PP’s election program and Feijóo had mentioned it before. It concerns IRPF (Impuesto sobre la Renta de las Personas Físicas, Spain’s personal income tax). According to El País, the offer has four steps:
- no IRPF in the first year of a first job;
- a reduction of 75% in the second year of work;
- a reduction of 50% in the third year;
- a reduction of 25% in the fourth year.
Feijóo argued that young people deserve it because they live worse than their parents did. He also said his party would raise tax revenue by lowering taxes. El País noted that on Friday he had cooled expectations of tax cuts because of the state of the public accounts, saying of the official figures: “I don’t believe the data.”
The Hernani incident and the stop in Gipuzkoa
Jon Echevarría, who heads the PP list for Congress in Gipuzkoa, posted a video and a message on X on Saturday saying that he and colleagues from Nuevas Generaciones (the PP’s youth wing) had been attacked in Hernani with firecrackers, eggs and stones. He called on the Ertzaintza (the Basque regional police) to guarantee their safety.
Feijóo blamed the incident on people he connected with EH Bildu, a Basque party he described as a partner of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, and said nobody would be driven off the street. His office told El País that the visit to Gipuzkoa will be fitted into Tuesday’s schedule, which already had Bilbao in the morning and Logroño in the afternoon.
The PSOE, Sánchez’s party, condemned the attack on Sunday. In a post on social media it rejected the attack outright and said violence has no place in a democracy.
The PP won no seat in Gipuzkoa in 2023. It is not running a Senate list there this time, having stepped aside in favor of Vox under a joint agreement for the upper house.
A flag dispute with the PNV
The PP’s regional accounts published videos of Feijóo with a separate message for each autonomous community, all under the campaign slogan Vota el cambio necesario (vote for the necessary change). The party also released an audio version of its program.
The Basque video drew a complaint from Maribel Vaquero, spokesperson in Congress for the PNV (the Basque Nationalist Party). She said the ikurriña, the Basque flag, was drawn wrongly in it, with the green stripes in the wrong place.
What it means for residents and young workers
The IRPF pledge is a campaign promise. It would need the PP to be able to govern after Nov. 29 and then to pass the change into law, and Feijóo said on Friday that he does not trust the official figures on the public accounts. As described, it would apply to people starting their first job, with the benefit shrinking each year until the fourth.
Polls show the two main parties competing for first place, according to El País, which said the PP’s strategy is aimed in particular at young voters it is contesting with Vox. IRPF is the tax withheld from wages in Spain, so a change of this kind would show up in the payslips of the workers it covers.
Feijóo’s next scheduled campaign day is Tuesday, with Bilbao, the added stop in Gipuzkoa and Logroño.
Source: El País
