Pedro Sanchez, Spain’s Socialist prime minister, wants to abolish the country’s ‘Golden Visa’ scheme, according to which non-EU citizens automatically receive residency for three years if they purchase property worth at least €500,000 (£429,000). Sanchez hopes that doing so will help tackle the cost-of-living crisis and soaring rental prices in the country’s biggest cities. It’s unlikely to do either. It might, however, have unintended positive effects in other areas.
Golden Visas were introduced by Spain’s then-Conservative government in 2013, as a way of stimulating foreign investment after the economic crisis. They can also be acquired by non-EU citizens who invest at least a million euros (£855,000) in Spanish shares or two million euros (£1.7 million) in the country’s public debt – two routes to residency that Sanchez proposes to leave open. But 94 per cent of Golden Visas awarded since 2013 have been pegged to high-end property purchases, which the Socialist leader claims is pricing Spaniards out of the market; affordable housing, he
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