It’s been two weeks since the Spanish government said it would completely cancel the golden visa scheme, including for investment in Spain, after Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced last April that his administration would scrap the golden visa for non-EU nationals who buy Spanish property worth €500,000.

Spanish authorities also reportedly now know how they will ‘slip in’ the legislation that brings the golden visa cancellation into force, following months of incertitude over how they could legally do it.

But for sociologist at London’s School of Economics Kristin Surak, author of the book “The Golden Passport”, the golden visa cancellation is just to win votes that won’t actually come to fruition.

In an interview with Spanish daily El Confidencial, Surak said “it is the same thing that is being seen in Portugal. It is nothing more than a vote-winning measure and has such a small impact that it is of no interest beyond votes”. 

Portugal did initially suggest that it would get rid of its golden visa scheme but instead decided it would only scrap some of its investment options.

“It’s true that it (the golden visa) has become a symbol and that is why politicians mention it,” she added.

ANALYSIS: Is Spain’s decision to axe golden visa about housing or politics?

Both Spain and Portugal have seen their property prices and rents skyrocket in recent years and the surge of home purchases by foreigners and the proliferation of short-term holiday lets in residential buildings have been blamed to a lesser or greater extent in the two Iberian nations.

For Surak, if foreigners are in any way to blame for housing crises in Spain and Portugal, it’s Europeans themselves, not the non-EU nationals who are buying expensive properties to gain EU residency.

READ ALSO: Foreigners buy up homes in Spain in record numbers

“Not even the Chinese or the Russians are a significant enough number to move the market. But of course, no one is going to come out and say that we should ban these Europeans from buying houses in our country,” Surak told El Confidencial.

The only foreign nationals to buck this trend in Spain are Britons, non-EU nationals since Brexit, as they are the foreign population group who account for the most property purchases by non-Spaniards in Spain in 2023 (9.53 percent).

Surak’s book “The Golden Passport” is described as “the first comprehensive on-the-ground investigation of the global market for citizenship, examining the wealthy elites who buy passports, the states and brokers who sell them, and the normalisation of a once shadowy practice”. 

Although Spain’s golden visa gives residency rather than citizenship, it does give holders the option of applying for Spanish nationality after ten years.

“Let’s be honest,” she tells El Confidencial, “how many countries have actually stopped the programme? The United Kingdom and Ireland did so a few years ago, Portugal announced it but has not yet approved it, and the same goes for Spain. 

“They have been announcing it for some time because it makes a good electoral slogan, but they have not dared to do it”.

Asked if she specifically believed that Spain’s golden visa would not be cancelled, Surak admitted that “she didn’t see it clearly”, that “it sounds very good to say we’re not going to let rich people buy their citizenship” but that “7,000 people (golden visa holders), if you add applicants and family” are “very small numbers”.

For Surak, what’s prevented golden visas from being revoked in the past are “real estate lobbies” that have been profiting from these schemes and “want them to continue”.

“Migration policy is generally incoherent,” the author concludes.

“Each country has interest groups or bureaucrats who decide what they are going to do: we are going to do this for students, or we need this for professionals, or we need the Beckham Law, which you have there in Spain.

“Once they are in the laws, they are difficult to change”.

According to Henley & Partners, over 100 countries around the world across five continents offer golden visas.

READ ALSO: What the end of all of Spain’s golden visas means for foreigners