Pedro Sánchez demanded Rajoy elections in 2018 if he had no budgets: “A government without accounts is as useful as a car without gasoline”

Pedro Sánchez opens the door, already publicly, to move forward with the legislature still without general state budgets (PGE). On Thursday, after the European Summit in Brussels, he reiterated that his government does not renounce, at the end of the first quarter of the year, to present the accounts, although he admitted that time runs and said that, despite the lack of support, his “economic policy” supports to continue another year without budgets, after having extended those of 2023 for the second time. «If they are not approved, budgets are extended. Without any doubt, because right now what we need is stability, ”he said at a press conference.

The argument now used by the chief of the Executive is far from that in the first two months of 2018, when he was still head of the opposition, he used Mariano Rajoy, who at that time resisted approveing ​​in the Council of Ministers the draft Law on General State Budgets, as finally made in an extraordinary session on March 27. Practically, on these same dates. That possibility begins to escape Pedro Sánchez, resigned to recognize that he does not have the support of his investiture partners.

On February 27, 2018, the general secretary of the PSOE went to Mariano Rajoy, in a federal committee of the party in Aranjuez, to affirm that «avoid their responsibilities to institutions»And demand that he fulfill his” main and first obligation “, which is to approve general budgets, as the popular leader did only one month later. “A government without budgets is as useful as a car without gasoline,” said Pedro Sánchez, in a radically contrary speech that he maintains now. “Living from extension is extending people’s problems,” he denounced then.

That same message repeated it for weeks, although at the beginning of that year the president confirmed that the PGE bill would take the Council of Ministers. On February 21, at another rally, he accused Rajoy’s government as “not wanting to do anything” for not presenting the accounts. «The reflection that we should share, and that the president should be made, is that a government that has no budgets It is a government that cannot governthat he cannot do anything, ”he criticized in the course of an open assembly held in Bilbao.

A week later, Sánchez raised the bet. He demanded Mariano Rajoy that if he was not able to present the budgets immediately and “to have a parliamentary majority to approve them,” he had to summon the Spaniards to the polls “so that a different majority can be built.” This was claimed in an interview, in which he also reproached that an executive cannot extend “his fundamental law.” «What Spain does not deserve is a government that aspires only to extend some budgets already extended, because whoever who Extend an extensionWhat he does is extend the real problems of citizens, ”he said in ‘El Confidencial’.

“Or budgets or elections,” he continued to insist on his social networks, with attacks on both PP and Citizens, which he accused of being “hinge” of the popular. «Both the PP and CS have to put their differences aside, more electoralists than ideological, and say whether or not there are budgets. If they are not capable, what Let the Spaniards go to the polls to allow another majority to solve the problems of citizenship, ”he said on another occasion on Twitter (now X).

The then chief of the opposition repeated that speech one, two and three times, insisting on the “paralysis” in the legislative action of the government of Mariano Rajoy. “It is a divided government, exhausted in terms of its political impulse, besieged by cases of corruption and crossed arms before the problems that affect the day -to -day life of people.” It was March 5, 2018 and Pedro Sánchez reproached the president of the Government who, at that point, “we still did not know Mr. Rajoy’s budgetary proposal” for the alleged “Cold War” at that time they maintained the PP and CS.

And he launched a proposal: “If Rajoy does not approve the budgets and does not anticipate the elections, what we will demand is that, by obligation with the citizenship of this country and for constitutional responsibility, I will have to undergo a matter of trust.”