This Monday, the Executive deployed a little theater to convey the impression that it is capable of governing, activating the process to present a draft General State Budget and presenting the first details of the reform of the autonomous financing model on which it is working.
At the meeting of the last Fiscal and Financial Policy Council, scheduled to inform the communities of the deficit and public spending path for next year, Maria Jesus Montero He has announced that the proposal that he plans to present between the end of January and mid-February contemplates a general part applicable to the common regime and the option of negotiating with each community its own “singularities.”
It is evident that the Government has entered electoral mode and has taken regional financing as a political weapon.
Montero has guaranteed that all the Autonomous Communities will receive 7.7% more resources than last year and a greater transfer of taxes. But, on the other hand, regions that exercise “dumping fiscal” lowering taxes.
A questionable hybrid of “multilateral and bilateral negotiation” amounts, as the government of Emiliano García-Pageto a way of recognizing privileges and advantages to some communities to the detriment of others under the guise of “singularity.”
A la carte financing is a way to put pressure on the autonomous communities of the PP (which are those that maintain reduced taxes such as Wealth or Inheritance and have cut part of their autonomous personal income tax rate) at a time when several of them are in the middle of the electoral pre-campaign.
The scheme, which puts the presidents of the PP between a rock and a hard place, reveals that the Government does not care as much about the Budgets as it does about regional financing.
Because thanks to this proposal he can cajole ERC and show that he intends to comply with the agreement for the Catalan quota.
But, furthermore, given that the model will foreseeably be rejected by the opposition communities (in addition to Castilla-La Mancha), Moncloa can load itself with arguments to blame the PP regions for preventing social spending that would enable a reform of the financing system and the approval of expansive Budgets.
And thus it would provide Montero (who, in addition to being Minister of Finance, is a candidate in the next Andalusian elections) an electoral asset against Juanma Moreno.
In addition, the Ministry of Finance has proposed to the communities a maximum deficit of 0.1% until 2028, far from the 0.4% requested by the advisors of the PP autonomies.
That, after two years in which the deficit path has been rejected (thus preventing the approval of the Budgets in the last two years), the Government has presented the same objectives as last July, invites us to suspect that, as it has postulated Alvaro Nadal In her interview with EL ESPAÑOL, María Jesús Montero has raised them with the idea that they will be rejected again in Congress.
In this way, The Government would have an excuse not to present next year’s Budgets either. Thus Sánchez could argue that he has not failed to fulfill the commitment he made to bring the accounts to Parliament. And, with this, he would also provide himself with an alibi to, eventually, call for an early election.