The Government has until Monday, September 30, to present the draft of the General State Budget for 2025 to Congress. A countdown of less than five weeks in which, although its intention is to comply with the calendar established by the Constitution, it will once again depend on the Catalan separatists, with Junts at the head, to approve the prerequisite, the spending ceiling that sets the foundations of the public accounts in each year. The progressive coalition of PSOE and Sumar does not give up on approving the Budgets, as it already did in its previous variant with Unidas Podemos in 2021, 2022 and 2023, but in La Moncloa they are already putting warm cloths in private and contemplating, as EL PAÍS anticipated, a budget extension if the Chamber does not give the green light to its accounts. It would be the second consecutive and the sixth in a decade that coincides with the roller coaster that Spanish politics has become.
“The responsibility and task of the Spanish Government is to push forward and present the Budgets and we are on time and in good shape,” said the Government spokesperson, Pilar Alegría, at the first Council of Ministers after the summer break, in which she appealed to the “responsibility” of the political groups so that Spain updates its accounts for next year. Sources from the top of the Government nevertheless emphasize that an extension would not be a drama since the current Budgets, for 2023, are very expansive thanks to the boost from European funds.
Carles Puigdemont’s party already unexpectedly derailed the path to stability at the end of July, blowing up the plans of La Moncloa, which a few days earlier had approved a spending ceiling slightly higher than the one it had designed for 2024. The message from Junts, that the vote of its seven deputies cannot be taken for granted, has been hanging over the Palacio de La Moncloa and the Ministry of Finance ever since. Nor can the support of the seven ERC seats be taken for granted due to the different interpretation that the socialists make of the fiscal agreement – for the Republicans it is an economic agreement and for the PSOE a singular financing – that made the investiture of Salvador Illa possible. Junts and ERC hold their congresses in the autumn, which complicates everything even more. “They are also outside of governments,” they stress at the top of Ferraz in reference to the Palau de la Generalitat, “which increases the difficulties.”
Immersed in another dizzying start to the school year, the Government is not fooling itself and has long since assumed its parliamentary minority in Congress, where less than a year has passed and the majority that made Pedro Sánchez’s investiture possible is no longer assured. The president managed to forge a motley alliance with the nationalists, with the whole spectrum of the Catalan left and right that last November was worth his continuity in La Moncloa. The curves have been coming one after another since then and are increasingly tighter, especially since the approval of the amnesty law, the application of which does not depend on the Government but on the interpretation, with the Supreme Court very reticent, that the courts of justice are making.
Since the measure of grace came into force, Junts has shown that it is more independent and that is the main problem that the Government will have to solve. The latest example was seen this Tuesday in the Permanent Commission of Congress, where it supported the appearances of Sánchez to explain the migration policy of the Executive and of the First Vice President and Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, on the singular financing for Catalonia, unsuccessfully requested by the PP. Sánchez has at least one advantage: a clear horizon of electoral appointments after the elections in Galicia, Euskadi, Catalonia and the European elections in the first half of the year. The advance of the Catalan elections upset the roadmap of La Moncloa, which until then saw itself in a position to bring out the accounts for 2024. Even if it was late in the year. At the core of the Government it is also clear that there will be no Budgets at any price. That is, if the separatists overthrow them and they have to be extended, there will be no early elections, as happened in 2019. The context was then very different: Sánchez had practically just arrived at La Moncloa after the motion of censure against Mariano Rajoy in June 2018 and the political context was very different. The weakness of Sumar is another determining factor for the PSOE not to consider new general elections, less than two years after those of July 2023.
The PSOE is also clear that it cannot count on the PP, but not for the Budgets, but for the spending ceiling. The socialists will relentlessly attack Alberto Núñez Feijóo on that flank. The consequence of another parliamentary defeat of the Government like the one in July is that the autonomous communities would have 6,000 million less and the town councils 4,500 million. A blow that would be suffered above all by the barons of the PP, which presides over 11 communities in addition to the cities of Ceuta and Melilla and governs in the majority of large cities after the disaster of the left in the autonomous and municipal elections of May 2023.
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