44 Europe The EconomistJuly 20th 2019
21bet is that Mr Iglesias will come back to the
table rather than risk another election. In
April Podemos lost 29 seats and over a
quarter of its vote, mainly to the Socialists.
Polls suggest it would now do even worse.
But another election is risky for the prime
minister too. Voters might blame him for
political paralysis. So the betting in Madrid
is that a deal will be struck for a low-level
coalition. Mr Sánchez is “a good negotia-
tor” and he has the initiative, says Eduardo
Serra, a former minister. After ousting Mr
Rajoy in a censure motion in June 2018, he
managed to govern for 11 months with just
84 seats.
To consolidate Spain’s slowly fading
economic recovery, tackle the social scars
of its previous slump and contain Catalan
separatism will be hard. It would requirereforms of the labour market, education
and training and regional financing, as
well as deficit-cutting. The first task is to
approve a budget. Mr Sánchez envisages
some tax increases but also the gradual im-
plementation of a public-spending review.
On many of these issues Podemos would be
an awkward partner.
Spain’s politicians are still struggling to
adapt to change. Since democracy was re-
stored in 1977 it has never had a coalition
government. But under the strain of slump
and separatism, the old two-party system
has splintered. The top dogs are all young
and inexperienced; at 47, Mr Sánchez is the
oldest of the national leaders. Neverthe-
less, Spaniards will be fed up if they fail to
give the country a government before they
head for the beaches next month. 7S
cience isstilla man’sworld.Since
1903, when Marie Curie first won the
Nobel Prize, almost 600 blokes but only
19 women have taken home the coveted
award in physics, chemistry or medicine.
In the realms of more ordinary talent,
just 28% of the world’s researchers are
women. Even in the eu, where the sexes
are more equal than in other parts of the
world, a mere two-fifths of scientists and
engineers are women. In Germany and
Finland, it is less than one in three.
Eastern Europe bucks the global
trend, according to a recent report from
Leiden University in the Netherlands. In
Lithuania, 57% of scientists and engi-
neers are women. Bulgaria and Latvia
follow close behind, at 52%. Universities
in Poland and Serbia were ranked among
the best in the world for sexual equality
in research publications. South-east
Europe is roughly at parity: 49% of scien-
tific researchers in the region are wom-
en. Some of this is a legacy of Soviet
times, when communist regimes
pressed both men and women into scien-
tific careers and did not always give them
a choice about it. The coercion has gone,
but the habit of women working in labs
has remained.
In Europe today, campaigners to get
more women into top boffin jobs com-
plain of a “leaky pipeline”: many women
end their involvement with stemsub-
jects (science, technology, engineering
and maths) after finishing college. How-
ever, a study by Microsoft finds that
female role models strongly increase
girls’ interest in these subjects.
According to the European InstituteforGenderEquality, closing the gap
between men and women in stemwould
lead to an increase in the eu’s gdpper
capita by at least 3% by 2050 and create
over 1.2m jobs. Over the past decade,
employment in Europe’s tech sector has
grown four times faster than overall
employment. But the European Commis-
sion predicts that by 2020, the region’s
growth could be hampered by a shortage
of 500,000 information and communi-
cations technology (ict) workers.
In 2017 more than half of eubusiness-
es that tried to recruit ictspecialists had
trouble filling the vacancies. Lithuania,
which has Europe’s narrowest employ-
ment gap between the sexes, and Bulgar-
ia, which has the highest proportion of
women in ictspecialised jobs in the
region, found it easier.Ladiesofthelab
Women and workBRUSSELS
In much of eastern Europe, half the scientists are womenMove overI
n 1953 workersin what was then East
Germany protested against their Soviet
overlords on Karl-Marx-Allee, a monumen-
tal boulevard in Berlin lined with Stalinist
apartment blocks. The uprising was
crushed. Earlier this year residents of the
Allee, now yuppier, again took to the
streets—to demand socialist policies. They
called for big landlords’ properties to be ex-
propriated and rents to be frozen in the
capital. This time, the authorities listened.
On June 18th legislators in Berlin voted
to freeze rents for five years, excluding so-
cial housing and new-builds. The German
capital thus joins a growing club of Euro-
pean cities implementing rent controls.
Spain recently limited annual rent hikes,
and Barcelona followed up with even
stricter rules. Amsterdam is trying to stop
investors buying up new-builds to rent
them out expensively. On July 1st Paris rein-
troduced rent caps, which had been
scrapped only in 2017.
The proposal in Berlin is the most radi-
cal of these. Under new rules, rents that are
deemed too high would be lowered. The
law would be retroactive from June 18th, so
that anyone who attempts to jack up prices
before it is passed could be fined €500,000
($563,000). Landlords who want to make
renovations that would push up prices by
more than €0.50 per square metre will have
to seek approval. The decision could face
challenges from the national government,
but may become law early next year.
In recent years cheap borrowing, low
unemployment, an influx of foreign in-
vestment and population growth have
helped to push up demand for houses
across European cities. The rise of Airbnb, a
home-stay site, and the relocation of com-
panies due to Brexit, particularly to Frank-
furt, Paris and Amsterdam, have acceler-
ated the trend. Anger about gentrification
and “over-tourism” may also have played a
part in the Berlin proposal, as well as prac-
tices that have allowed certain rents to rise
much faster than wage growth, pricing a lot
of people out of the market.
Economists warn that rent caps tend to
have perverse effects. Landlords will often
be tempted to skimp on repairs or may sim-
ply seek to sell their properties, as hap-
pened in Britain, where rent caps existed
until the 1980s. Controls tend to deter in-
vestment in the housing market, thus ag-
gravating the shortages that prompted
them in the first place. The head of the Ger-Instead of building more homes, cities
try to dictate rentsRent controlsA policy that never
works