The Government will not present the 2026 General State Budgets before the end of the year, as Pedro Sánchez promised, unless the parliamentary groups communicate their support in the coming weeks. The Treasury will not take the budget project to the Council of Ministers until February, as admitted by the first vice president, María Jesús Montero, who intends for it to be approved in April or May. However, the breakup of Junts has left it white and black that the public accounts will not move forward. And there the Government assures that it will take advantage of “any window of opportunity”, that is, that they would present them again if there is a change in the rejection of those of Carles Puigdemont.
Montero has said that the intention is to present the Budgets “at the most advanced date”, which he has placed, however, “in a horizon of the beginning or middle of the first quarter of next year” with the aim that they can be “approved in April or May.” What the head of the Treasury says is that the Budgets are outlined and that if the groups communicated their intention to support them, she would bring forward that date. “If tomorrow several groups tell me that they are willing to approve them now, I will tell them that we will present it before the end of the year,” he said at the press conference after the Council of Ministers.
However, in Moncloa they know that this situation is not going to happen and they have even prepared the story to ensure that the legislature would continue even if the Budgets fail in Congress. And it is the most feasible scenario that the president’s team handles. However, the Executive is keeping the chance that there could be a change in Junts’ ‘no’, for example, if Puigdemont were to return in the event of a possible ruling by the EU Court of Justice. Government sources assure that, in that case, the same public accounts would be presented again, even if the Treasury Department has already changed hands due to the departure of Montero as a candidate for the elections in Andalusia.
The Government has acknowledged for the first time publicly that it will delay the presentation of the Budgets at the press conference following the Council of Ministers in which the stability path was approved. The Executive has raised the ceiling of non-financial expenditure of the General State Budgets to 216,177 million euros, 8.5% more than last year, a record public expenditure and “attractive” for the rest of the political formations, with which they foresee a “capacity to extend rights” and “consolidate budget items of the Welfare State.”
The “expansive budgets” are going to be the argument that the Executive is going to use to try to obtain support, although it assumes that it will be impossible to obtain it. The same happens with the stability path, which will be voted on in Congress before the end of the year. Montero is already counting on Parliament to overthrow it and assures that it will not affect the central government. Of course, he attacks the PP for its refusal to support those framework figures that represent an extra spending capacity of 5.5 billion euros for the autonomous communities.
“I hope that the political groups, especially the PP, which governs a large part of the autonomous communities, are responsible, do not harm the citizens who live in our territories because rejecting this path of stability only harms the autonomous governments. And, furthermore, it does not paralyze or imply any deviation from the approval of our budgets, as we have planned,” Montero warned.
“They give up access to those resources. The General Administration of the State will be happy to collect those resources to develop their policies,” said the head of the Treasury, who recalled that the autonomous communities of the PP did not want to make “the fool” of voting in favor in the Fiscal and Financial Policy Council only for the PP to reject it in Congress, as happened on previous occasions. “How do Bonilla, Ayuso, Mazón, inside or outside, explain that it is there but it is not there, and the rest of the regional officials who, having greater spending capacity, are rejected for the simple fact of not voting on anything that is proposed by this Government?” he asked.
In the Government they maintain that the negotiation of the new regional financing model will not affect the budget talks and they assume that the debt forgiveness will go ahead because it will have the support of Junts. Montero has also taken the opportunity to criticize the PP for rejecting this measure. “All the autonomous communities will sign the debt forgiveness, even if they vote against,” he expressed, before pointing out that it will be a “politics contradiction.”
Source: www.eldiario.es
