Spain’s leftwing labour minister, Yolanda Díaz, has proposed a scheme to tackle social inequality by giving every young person in the country €20,000 (£17,000) to be spent on study, training or setting up a business once they reach the age of 18.
According to Díaz’s Sumar platform, which announced the policy before Spain’s snap general election on 23 July, the initiative would cost €10bn, which would be raised by taxing the rich.
Sumar said the aim was to guarantee “equality of opportunity” regardless of people’s family backgrounds or earnings. The payments, which would begin at the age of 18 and continue until the age of 23, would be accompanied by administrative support to help people study, train or establish their own business.
“It’s about letting young people have a future and giving them the chance to study or start a business without that having to depend on their surnames or the family they are from,” Díaz told a gathering of foreign correspondents in Madrid on Wednesday afternoon.
“That’s why we’re proposing that people will be given €20,000 when they turn 18 so that they can develop, whether that’s by studying or by setting up a business. That’s what’s at stake on 23 July.”
Díaz confirmed that the policy – called the “universal inheritance” – would be available to all young Spaniards regardless of their economic circumstances and would be funded by taxing people earning more than €3m a year. Sumar estimates it would cost 0.8% of Spain’s GDP.
The minister, who was raised in a staunchly communist household, said she had been unable to follow her own dreams of becoming an employment inspector because there was not enough money for her to spend years studying.
“Becoming an employment inspector in Spain would have taken about five years,” she said. “I’m not an employment inspector because I’m the daughter of working-class parents and I could never have allowed myself to do that. This is a redistributive measure that will allow the young people of our country to have a future regardless of their surname.”
Sumar’s proposal has raised eyebrows on both sides of Spain’s political divide. Nadia Calviño, the economy minister in the socialist-led coalition government, questioned how the policy would work in practice.
“Anyone who proposes giving subsidies or grants without any kind of restrictions when it comes to income levels or aims needs to explain how it would be financed because we’re going to have to carry on with a responsible fiscal policy over the coming years,” Calviño told the Onda Cero radio station on Monday.
The opposition conservative People’s party (PP), which is leading the socialists in the polls but which is expected to have to rely on the support of the far-right Vox party to form a government if it wins the election – was blunter still.
A PP spokesperson accused Sumar of getting her priorities badly wrong and suggested the government focus on other problems in a country where they said “27% of the population is at risk of social exclusion, where the unemployment rate is the highest in Europe, where families can’t make it to the end of the month and where self-employed people are struggling to stay afloat”.
