Spain’s leftist Labour Minister, Yolanda Díaz, has called for a so-called ‘Trump Tax’ on tech companies so they pay tax in the country.
Spain’s Labour Minister and Second Vice-President, Yolanda Díaz, announced on Monday that her hard-left party Sumar will demand a so-called “Trump tax” to make big US technology companies pay taxes in Spain and guarantee “fair” competition with Spanish competitors.
When pressed on what a hypothetical ‘Trump Tax’ would actually include, however, Díaz revealed very little. Speaking at the Metafuturo event in Madrid, the left-wing Minister said details of the tax will be made public in time along with the rest of Sumar’s proposals for the state budget.
Díaz’s Sumar is the junior coalition partner with the ruling Socialists (PSOE).
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Ministry sources, however, have indicated to Spanish daily El País that it could consist of increasing the pre-existing ‘Google tax’, which currently sits at 3 percent and is levied on different digital services such as online advertising and the sale of data generated from user provided information.
Further increasing this levy would risk the ire of Trump, and the Google Tax has already ruffled feathers in Washington. When Economy Minister Carlos Cuerpo met with US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the Americans reportedly asked that it be scrapped.
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Nonetheless, Díaz claimed her party will demand from the PSOE in upcoming budget negotiations the inclusion of a ‘Trump Tax’, arguing the measure is needed to rebalance the tax burden in Spain.
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“What cannot be is that five big tech companies – Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta (Facebook) and Microsoft – do not pay taxes in our country, do not pay them in Europe and do not pay them in the world. In other words, what we are going to ask them to do is to come down from the clouds and pass by the Spanish treasury”, Díaz explained.
Díaz also pointed out that the self-employed in Spain are taxed at between 15-18 percent but large companies at an average of just 7 percent. “The big technology companies are making a mockery of what they are doing to Spaniards, Spaniards and Europeans. Therefore, we are going to demand this “Trump tax” in the negotiations with the Socialist Party, because they have to pay taxes”, Díaz said.
“This ‘Trump tax’ has to make “big tech” pay taxes,” the Minister reiterated.
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In her speech, Díaz also called on the European Union to apply a new regulatory framework that guarantees transparency and compliance with an ethical framework for companies that develop artificial intelligence (AI) models.
Díaz argued that “we need more transparency to know what the data produce and how the algorithms work, which are totally opaque.”
Denouncing the “production model of Silicon Valley and Amazon, which consists of depleting territories and making employees work 120 hours a week [and] violating human rights”, Díaz called for Europe to take different path to US President Trump, who, she said, “is doing what he has to do to defend the interests of the big five technology companies and is putting the US government at their service.”
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