Sumar and the PSOE are immersed in the negotiation of the General State Budgets. The conversations are going in blocks and at this moment they address the fiscal part. The coalition led by Yolanda Díaz wants to take advantage of public accounts to address an in-depth tax reform and has denounced in recent days that its partner’s positions on this point are still very far away.
“As you know, we are negotiating the taxation part and we are very distant at this moment with the PSOE. We need more income, more social justice, the permanence of taxes that we have already achieved,” listed this Monday the second vice president of the Government, Yolanda Díaz, who warned that they will not support setbacks in this sense: “We will not count on the 27 Sumar deputies in a regressive proposal.”
Díaz, who attended an informative breakfast this Monday with the general secretary of the Workers’ Commissions (CCOO), Unai Sordo, has been warning for days that the positions between them and the PSOE are far apart regarding the fiscal issue. But in his statements this Monday he raised the tone to warn that they will be inflexible on some issues that are on the table. Among them, making permanent the special taxes on large electricity companies and banks and also avoiding deductions that allow these companies to benefit and nullify the collection power of these taxes.
This is what Sumar’s economic spokesman, Carlos Martín, explained at a press conference this Monday. “What we want is to maintain taxes and not return them through the back door. It does not seem logical to introduce a gift. “They would not understand that we establish a tax and then make a series of deductions,” he said. “Within the government partners the distance is great because for us, banking and energy taxes are non-negotiable,” he added.
These statements came just days after the Minister of Economy, Carlos Body, spoke of making these two fiscal tools permanent, but at the same time adapting them to “investment and credit cycles and rates.” It is a similar idea to the one that he already mentioned in April, when he spoke of “adjusting” the mechanism “to some fundamental elements of economic policy, such as the evolution of the interest rate cycle or other objectives such as promoting loans to SMEs.” [pequeñas y medianas empresas]”.
At Sumar they understand that this nuance can endanger the effectiveness of the measure. If the tax is conditioned on interest rates being above a certain percentage, it may not affect banks for years.
Another “gift”, as Sumar describes it, is actually a measure that the PSOE already tried to introduce a few months ago, when it was negotiating the anti-crisis decrees last December and had the prospect of a Budget for 2024, which it finally ended up scrapping. Then, the Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, announced that she would change the tax on electricity companies to “incentivize investment in electrification.” That is, tax credits in exchange for investments in green energy projects, for example. A measure that already had protests from Yolanda Díaz’s people at the time.
“We are not going to agree to Sumar with any gift via subsidies to banks and energy companies,” Martín Urriza insisted this Monday. “We want a tax reform that is fair, that the taxes that we have already designed remain, on large fortunes, on banking and on energy companies,” Díaz insisted in other statements to the media this afternoon.
The “temporary” taxes on banking and energy companies have collected 2,859 million in 2024, a figure very similar to that of 2023. 1,695 million euros correspond to the public income obtained from the record profits of financial entities during the previous year, and 1,164 million correspond to large electricity or oil companies.
Sumar clings to these data to defend that the Government maintains the taxes, a negotiation closely tied to that of public accounts. And, secondly, remember that they included this measure in the Government agreement they signed with the PSOE.
The text of that agreement is, however, somewhat ambiguous: “We will review the taxes on banks and energy companies with the aim of readjusting and maintaining them once their current period of application expires, so that both sectors continue to contribute to justice.” fiscal and the maintenance of the welfare state.”
“At Sumar we will not accept that the PSOE renounces the permanence of these taxes, and we will not accept that they be diluted by reducing their collection to favor the banks and the energy oligopoly,” sources from the coalition convey. Sumar also wants to add a return to this tax and ensure that its collection is destined to increase the public housing stock and thus provide solutions to the great social problem, they believe, which is resulting in the increase in rents.
They seek to accompany this measure with others such as the increase in taxation to make tourist apartments less profitable or the creation of a “competitive and conditional public fund” on communities meeting certain requirements in terms of housing, such as the mobilization of empty apartments or the promotion of a public affordable housing stock.
“Comprehensive” tax reform
The reform that Sumar seeks is not limited in any case to maintaining the validity of these taxes. Martín Urriza defended this Monday that his ambition is a “comprehensive” reform of the tax system. “We are not going to settle for a partial one,” he said. Currently, the deputy has reviewed, Spain loses 80,000 million in revenue by being below the average level of the eurozone.
One of the coalition’s ambitions for this negotiation is the creation of a new tax figure that taxes large inheritances. “It is suggested that a Large Inheritance Tax be created or, alternatively, that capital gains from inheritances and donations be included in personal income tax. This tax would be the difference between the state tax and that established by the autonomous communities, encouraging the latter not to reduce the tax below the established minimum,” read the text they presented then and which serves Sumar as a basis to start these conversations. with the PSOE.
As the approval of the General State Budget does not allow the introduction of new taxes or modification of personal income tax, Sumar proposes to the PSOE that the agreement for public accounts be accompanied by a commitment to approve this new tax through a new bill in the period of six months.
This Monday, Díaz also spoke of a corporate tax reform that prevents a small company from paying taxes at 17.5% and a large corporation from paying 3.8%.
The Fiscal and Structural Plan presented by the Government in recent days takes into account, as a measure already taken, the minimum rate of 15% for multinationals, which is the transposition of a European directive and which is being developed in Congress. From the Ministry of Finance they defend that the coalition governments have already made other important changes “following the premise that whoever has more should contribute.”
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