The PP on Tuesday threw the full weight of its absolute majority in the Senate against the first vice-president, María Jesús Montero. Up to eight representatives of the Popular Party tried to corner the Minister of Finance, in the control session of the Upper House, with the issues of regional financing, the uncertainty about the Budgets or the fiscal situation of the brother of the President of the Government. Montero stuck to the motto so dear to the Spanish Parliament that the best defence is a good attack. And the result was an exchange of blows for two hours. The vice-president offered the PP a “discreet” negotiation to find a new model of regional financing between the two. There was no response.
When the popular ones deploy their arsenal in this way, the hemicycle is filled with phrases of this tenor: “You are the advisors “The Sánchez family. Tell the Almighty, His Holiness…” (Luis Santamaría). “You don’t care about housing policy, the only thing that worries the big boss is his home: La Moncloa” (Alicia García). “The only thing that is negotiated in La Moncloa are Begoña Gómez’s contracts. State issues are negotiated in Switzerland” (Salvador de Foronda). The latter had yet another big pearl. He invented what, according to him, the head of the Catalan Government, Salvador Illa, had told him former president Jordi Pujol in the interview between the two last week: “Don’t worry, Jordi, in 2025 your file for having defrauded the Spanish State of 8.6 million over 34 years will be thrown into the trash and you will be honourable again.” Montero was perplexed: “Do you realise that you have accused the president of the Generalitat of a crime?”
Not all the PP speakers slipped into these precipices. Others went deeper into the issues, especially the agreement on “singular financing” for Catalonia between the Socialists and ERC. The most incisive was the Valencian Gerardo Camps, in a format, that of the interpellation, with more time than in the quick questions of the control session. Montero did not deviate from the Government’s speech: the pact with ERC includes an express reference to “solidarity” with the whole of the State, and the Executive is committed to transferring more funds to all the communities. “Any privilege is a detriment to others,” replied Camps, who ironically commented on the vice president’s “masterpiece of verbal escapism.” “When this Government leaves, Spain will no longer be recognized,” he concluded.
As the PP insisted that the financing model must be agreed upon by all, the minister proposed to negotiate it with “discretion” between the Executive and the PP leadership. The word raised murmurs in the PP bench, but Montero insisted: “With discretion, yes, so that the different interests of their regional barons do not interfere.”
There are few issues on which the PP cannot find a phrase from Pedro Sánchez in his time as an opposition member that contradicts its current positions. For days now, its representatives have been repeating one from when Mariano Rajoy was extending the budget in a row: “A government without a budget is like an engine without petrol”. Camps dusted off another one on regional financing: “There cannot be special concessions for one community that do not exist for the others”.
The vice president arrived with another batch of newspapers on previous positions of the PP in favour of a special regime for Catalonia. Montero did not deny that, also in her personal case, the current positions are not the same as when she was Andalusian councillor. But she justified herself: “Mr Feijóo does not defend the same thing that he did when he was in Galicia. Back then we defended our territories, now we have to defend the whole of them.”
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Apart from the PP, the Minister of Finance faced questions from Vox and ERC, the latter on the tax situation of the emeritus king, a matter in which she expeditiously cleared the ball out of bounds. It was the appetizer of a parliamentary gymkhana for Montero, which will continue on Wednesday and Thursday in Congress. Another twist to financing and the Budgets unborn.
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