In just one month, Spanish politics has seen not one turnaround, but two or three. Significant events such as the case of José Luis Ábalos, the Íñigo Errejón scandal or the relations between the pro-independence parties and the government were buried by the DANA disaster in Valencia. Rebuilding devastated communities will take months and helping the hundreds of thousands of people affected will require an enormous mobilization of economic resources. And its impact will mark the negotiation of general state budgets that Pedro Sánchez already openly considers essential to be able to provide the response required by a climate crisis of such magnitude.
“Of course we will need new general state budgets,” the president acknowledged during his appearance this week in Moncloa, during which he detailed the first deployment of emergency aid. Questioned by the press, the leader of the Executive declared without hesitation that if the new accounts were already decisive from a purely political point of view for the stability of the legislature, the economic effects of the DANA now make it something peremptory .
“In this first royal decree-law, we are talking about aid of 10.6 billion euros. There are many economic resources, many others that we will have to request from community institutions and others that we will have to disburse from our public accounts. This will lead us to review the impact on the deficit and public debt. And find the most agile and efficient vehicles possible within the budgets to be able to provide the most efficient and equitable response possible in the shortest possible time,” explained Sánchez.
The PP then was quick to deduce from the president’s words blackmail and use of the victims of the disaster in search of political gain in the form of budgets to support the legislative body. In fact, the people of Feijóo even warned for a few hours that the million dollar aid announced by the government depended on the support of Pedro Sánchez for his accounts. Although, in the latter case, nothing could be further from the truth.
The day after the approval of the package of measures estimated at 10.6 billion, the decree was published in the Official Journal and therefore entered into force. Because this aid has no link with next year’s budget project and its financial allocation will come from an adjustment of the current budget through an extraordinary credit. Within a month, the majority of Congress must now validate this decree and thus authorize the increase in public spending.
Another thing concerns medium-term disbursements. And, at this point, Moncloa’s approach is that the Valencia tragedy completely changes a good part of the political and economic parameters in which the legislative body has located itself until now. As it did in its time with COVID-19 and with the effects of the war in Ukraine, the government now places at the forefront the need to respond to the devastated areas of Valencia and to the citizens who have lost everything, as nuclear. which public accounts should be oriented. And they also present it as an argument to convince their partners that they should support these accounts.
“If there was a reason to approve them before this DANA, clearly there is more now. I said that I would not shirk my responsibility to present the public accounts and, in this context, that responsibility is multiplied to colossal limits. And I hope that we will have the majority support of the House to approve budgets that are even more necessary today than yesterday,” Sánchez emphasized during his appearance.
If anyone on the presidential team expected this glove to be picked up in an office on Rue Génova, that expectation was disappointed. The PP transferred its support to Congress for the decree of urgent measures, but no one in the popular ranks even mentioned the hypothesis of being able to support government budgets which, moreover, know that they will support the mandate of Pedro Sánchez until ‘in 2027.
In case this has a contagion effect or as a simple communication strategy to convey a message of unity in the midst of the catastrophe, the Valencian socialists have already taken it upon themselves to announce that they will support the words presented by Carlos Mazón. In an interview this week on Cadena Ser, the Minister of Science and Secretary General of the PSPV-PSOE, Diana Morant, announced that the Valencian socialists will give their affirmative vote to the budgets of the Generalitat for 2025 and that “they will be at the level of aid” to citizens after the DANA disaster.
When asked if they would support the regional budgets for 2025, Morant, who assured that from the first day of the tragedy had told Mazón that he could count on her as minister and secretary general of the PSPV-PSOE, replied: “That doesn’t count.” It’s definitely not okay; In addition, we will help Mr. Mazón so that these budgets adequately reflect the needs of our neighbors.
In the meantime, the government’s conversations with the different political groups in Congress to move forward on the path to stability and new accounts have also been modified by the management of the disaster in Valencia. For ten days, most ministers have focused on promoting responses from each of their departments, some of which have yet to be outlined and announced, as in the case of the Ministry of Labor. But the idea is that, when political normality gradually takes hold, negotiations will resume with momentum and a change from the initial approach.
The plan with which the Ministry of Finance was working was that most of the new budgetary project would consist of the work advanced a year ago with the parliamentary groups and which ultimately was not materialized due to the early calling of the Catalan elections . But it is Pedro Sánchez himself who insists that the new emergency must now permeate everything.
“We are going to offer the parliamentary groups a new budgetary framework to face the realities of each of the territories, in particular of the communities, like Valencia, which are affected by this climate tragedy,” he declared.
It remains to be seen whether this calling into question the unity of the Government in the face of the upcoming negotiations opens the way to accountability and softens the strong positions adopted by certain parliamentary allies, notably the Catalan separatists. If this is achieved, the Government will have the support it requests to deal with the emergency in Valencia. And along the way, Pedro Sánchez would get the political lifeline he craves to survive the rest of the legislature.
