This article has been published in the journal Enbata of October 2022.

For a year, Alda has supported and supported 336 families and people, distributed his magazine in 35,000 copies in the working-class neighborhoods and in all the MRLs Norte or low-rent accommodation, promoted the first civic commissions and achieved important victories in the struggle for housing. Alda is on the right track. The moment this movement sets a new challenge, presenting it in the elections of HLM landlord representatives, we can all give them a hand to help us reuse. Because the victory of Alda will also be that of all those who want to build a pioneering and supportive Basque Country. Those who defend Euskal Herria who does not leave the weakest on the road. In November, for all of us to move, for Alda to win that new parium.

On the eve of the General Assembly of Alda, what is the balance of Alda's activity during the first two years?

Ainize Butron (AB): The balance goes beyond what would be expected in such a short time. To give an idea, in this last year alone, from September 2021 to September 2022, Alda has supported and supported 357 families or people, and has often solved their problem or situation. This is a great piece of work, as there are often problems that require a continuity of weeks or months.

What we're more happy about than that amount is that we're increasingly winning battles. Sometimes they are important because they change the lives of those involved. When we succeed in breaking a denial of naturalization for the immigrants who have done so here all their lives. Or when you get a Dal resource (Right opposed to housing). Or when we get people who lived in a garden house, in their car or on a acquaintance's couch, to buy a social home. Sometimes these victories seem anecdotal: Return of an amount unduly due by the SFR, recalification of an insurance contract or return of a security deposit. But the amounts of EUR 400 or 500 that are played in those wars are sometimes enough to bring red numbers to the citizens who ask for Alda’s support.

Currently, ALda has 400 members, most of them unknown to the founders of the association. Most of the members of Alde come from sectors with difficulties for the Abertzale movement.

Malika Peyraut (MP): Major political victories have been achieved in two years. The College has approved the Compensation launched by Alda to protect homes for tourism throughout the year through permanent Airbnb. The State has set up a Commission against Fraudulent Leases which will bring together the various services of the State and the Public Prosecutor’s Office. It's because of our actions and our work. In 2022, some 60 illegal rentals were directly reclassified, which allowed many other families or people to be at home in summer, or to be rented and thus charged to the LRP. This massive practice that further precarizes the tenants of the Basque Country was to eradicate it completely in 3 years. This new political victory can speed things up.

It is also worth noting the impact of the demonstration of 20 November 2021, which brought together 8,000 people in defense of the right to life and accommodation in the country. Aldak, along with EH Bai, Constructir Les Solidaires or many other entities such as Bizi, plays an important role in the animation of the unitary platform.

The construction of a popular smuggling that advances month by month also represents a breakthrough for our eyes. The Alda newspaper, which aims to be a popular and neighborhood voice, has now been disseminated in 35,000 copies, in all workplaces (social housing in the popular neighbourhoods of the Northern Basque Country and CEP).

How do you explain these amazing results?

VC: It was a real need for an organization like Alda. We see the situation of these families who come to ask for help and sometimes come desperate. We wondered how they did it before change existed.

The results are due a lot to the game used in Alda and experienced in other structures recorded around the Manu Robles-Arangiz Foundation. We are dealing systematically in two ways: to denounce the problems and to make an accurate diagnosis of them, but also to propose transparent solutions. Both radical and pragmatic. Going to the public, without waiting for us to come, is essential if we want to work especially with the most popular classes in the Northern Basque Country. Moving forward with them, which, given how they see things when they hear and move forward, represent solutions.

And in this method, the organization has an important place. It's all the organization, a slogan says halexe. The Enlightenment also represents it: if you organize small fish, they become more powerful than the thick fish that until then ate one at a time. One of the pillars is the effective functioning of the meetings. And we make a big bet on the collective organization of people coming to Alda. In the Population Committees, in the Collective Users, they are structured in different Commissions (Housing, Daily Wars, Legal, Diary, Logistics, etc. ). ). As a result, people are being trained, becoming more and more responsible and active.

MP: We don't want it to work as a window. Every time we see that problems are collective, when they affect different people or families -- we try to push group steps. This is the case for those who suffer from sales and recovery permits, the victims of fraudulent rents, who have been waiting for social housing for too long. We bring people together and we try to think in a group.

On the other hand, we are developing alliances. For example, with the Right to Housing Federation and the Abbé Pierre Foundation, both locally and statewide. This allows us, for example, to table legal amendments, right now, in the Finance Act of 2022, to change the taxation that will improve furniture leases over long-term rentals aberrantly. We are also thinking about how to amend the legislation on sales authorisations.

They're bad times. It attentively alters the rising prices of energy, housing and land, the climate change that is worsening, the government's bad shocks on pensions, unemployment compensation, retirement, social housing aid and LPA.

MP: La Alda is especially active in the private park, where tenants have the biggest problems: expelled after sales or restart permits, drowned by out-of-land rentals, residents in unhealthy apartments, etc.

At the same time, Alda also attends to some MRL tenants with other problems: molds, aging some residences, difficulties to achieve a housing change ...

In order to better prepare for these new challenges, Alda has decided to present HLM to the election of tenants' representatives. If the latter give us their trust, Alda is going to have elected office, she is going to become a "very representative association." This opens the door to various bodies and committees, sources of information, defensive options that we do not currently have available. The calculation of burdens, rehabilitation projects, the isolation of buildings and apartments, mutations, collective equipment, conciliation procedures, can be much more effective and reactive in the defense of the tenants of the social park.

What does Alda play in these HLM tenants elections?

VC: Acquiring the status of a representative association of tenants is an important bet for Alde. The different proposals and interventions that are made at local, local, agglomeration, social level; or at state level, before parliamentarians, ministries have a reinforced legitimacy. The practice leads us, de facto, to become real unions of tenants of the social and private park. But also a user union. Alda is an instrument of defense for the inhabitants of urban areas, in front of large companies such as SFR, some banking or asuranza companies, the administration and many other institutions, which abuse their current weakness.

MP: We have carried out a real programme, the result of different surveys and consultations with the tenants of MRLs in the Northern Basque Country, collecting the testimonies in our sustainability. We have worked collectively, with the help of social housing specialists, and we will defend this program in these elections and in the next 4 years.

How are you preparing for these elections?

MP: The great campaign runs throughout November and the elections (electronic votes or previous envelopes) from 16 November to 2 December.

The Party submits two lists. One at the level of HSA (Habitat Sud Atlantique), an entity linked to the Agglomeration of the Basque Country HLM, and another at the level of Office 64, an entity linked to the HLM Department. We present two lists, but only with HLM tenants from Euskal Herria, unlike other lists, which mainly present candidates from all over the department of Office 64.

It's an extra time for us. We do not have the experience of this type of election, nor the networks that have long been established by institutions such as CNL, CLCV, CSF or ADEIC. But we have motivated volunteers, fieldwork done since our foundation, oral work of all the people we have supported, and our working methods that have proven their effectiveness in other wars. We therefore hope to be elected. [...]