The Government of Pedro Sánchez is playing a simultaneous game of chess. This is how those championships are known in which a player plays several games at the same time with different rivals. The difference is that these meetings, usually exhibition ones, take place without a timer and the Executive has the stopwatch counting down to try to present the 2024 State Budget as soon as possible, once the amnesty move has been put on track. In this game of checkers, kings and pawns, the Executive barely has four or five weeks to close an agreement on public accounts with the parties that supported the investiture, because if it does not do so, another competition will begin.
Last Wednesday some members of the Executive discounted that after the agreement with the pro-independence parties on the amnesty law, the way was clear for the 2024 accounts and the legal project containing the expenses and income of the State would not be long in coming, but the The Ministry of Finance was quick to cool expectations. “It will not be imminent, but it will be as soon as possible,” they emphasize from the department headed by the first vice president, María Jesús Montero. The Treasury sends a message of caution, ruling out that the legal project will see the light of day in the extraordinary Council of Ministers that will be held this Friday or next Tuesday.
Before appearing before the Senate Finance Committee this Thursday morning, Montero herself acknowledged: “Everything in its time. We are talking to the groups to make it possible for there to be new accounts for the year 2024, which I believe is a magnificent way to exercise our powers in economic policy. So we went ahead talking to them. When there are agreements we will comment on them promptly.” She has insisted that the Government’s commitment is to present the Budget project and move it forward, but she has not given details about the schedule. “As soon as possible,” she indicated.
“It will be a matter of weeks, rather than days,” admit government sources, who explain: the amnesty and Budget negotiations have followed parallel paths, but not coincident ones. And, of course, the ministry emphasizes, they are not linked. “The Budgets are being negotiated now, before there have only been previous conversations,” point out the same sources, who acknowledge that the accounts will not be presented if a “minimum” agreement has not been reached before. This caution has to do with the distant stance that the Catalan parties express in public.
Junts and ERC demand improvements so that Catalonia has unique financing differentiated from the common regime system that works in the rest of the territories, with the exception of the Basque Country and Navarra, which have the quota and the agreement. The pro-independence groups have also asked the Government that the budgetary execution of the investments be closer to what is reflected in the public accounts and these, in turn, comply with the Statute of Catalonia, which recognizes a state investment comparable to the weight of this community. “The agreement is difficult in all areas,” insist government sources.
The Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, also spoke this Thursday about the procedure, shortly before the Justice Commission gave the green light to the changes in the amnesty law. He affirmed that there is an “unequivocal will” of all parliamentary groups to move forward with the Budgets, but clarified that they are not “agreed upon” or “closed.”
Calendar
Plus, the stopwatch is ticking. The 2024 State accounts should have been approved two months ago so that they could be executed from the beginning of the year, but the electoral calendar of last year disrupted all plans and forced the Executive to extend those for 2023 until having those for this year ready and tied. anus. The misgivings of Junts, which has maintained a cold distance from the Government until obtaining an amnesty law that meets its claims, and the parliamentary pause due to the Galician elections have delayed the process.
The Treasury has defined the main lines of the Budget for weeks. It knows how much it will spend on pensions, how much on civil servants’ salaries and interest, it plans to increase the allocations on housing and youth and has reserved the money to transfer to communities and municipalities for financing. With these headings, almost three quarters of the resources planned for this year have already been committed, but the move remains to be completed to convince the parties that support the Government, which are not few, and the margin is not wide because it has to reduce the deficit in about 11,000 million.
The Executive now wants to accelerate as much as possible because it considers that it only has four or five weeks to close the negotiations. Time is against them and so is arithmetic in the Cortes. The parliamentary process usually lasts about three months and on this occasion the PP threatens to delay the process in the Senate, where it enjoys a majority. This will place the final approval of the accounts at the end of June or beginning of July.
Those responsible for the Treasury know that if after Easter they do not reach an agreement with the parties that supported the investiture for the Budgets, they will probably have to give up the 2024 accounts because it would no longer make sense to approve a project only for four or five months. And, then, they will have to start focusing on those for 2025, whose processing begins in the summer.
The budget liturgy provides that, in the first half of each year, the Council of Ministers sets the debt and deficit objectives and the State spending ceiling. This procedure is considered the starting signal to begin preparing the accounts. The limit for preparing and registering the Budget project in the Cortes arrives shortly after, on September 30, as established by the Constitution – specifically, “at least three months before the expiration of those of the previous year” – a period that In recent years it has become blurred.
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