The First Vice President and Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, rejected on Tuesday the existence of an “independence quota” in the agreement for the financing of Catalonia and assured that it was a concept invented by the PP, which she accuses of not having read the text. Montero also criticized the party led by Alberto Núñez Feijóo for talking about budgetary solidarity while the communities they govern maintain tax cuts for the highest incomes while reducing budgets for public services.
“They forgive taxes on the highest incomes while they ask for more money from the State because they do not have enough to finance public services,” Montero said in one of his interventions during the executive control session in the plenary session of the Senate. “What kind of leaders are these?” asked the vice president. “Return to the sense of the State, stop holding the Spanish government responsible for its own powers.”
The government of Pedro Sánchez was forced this Tuesday to postpone the vote on the path to budgetary stability in the Congress of Deputies due to the lack of parliamentary support. The socialists criticized the lack of support to Junts, one of Sánchez’s investiture partners, but also to the PP, which they accuse of “irresponsibility” and of causing “serious damage” to the Autonomous Communities and municipalities, which would lose almost 12 billion. budget margin.
Six of the eight questions posed by the opposition to the Minister of Finance concerned the financing of Catalonia and budgetary solidarity between autonomous communities. From that of Vox senator Ángel Pelayo Gordillo Moreno, on the measures that the government will take “to reduce inequalities between Spaniards and the attack on solidarity between regions”, which he attributes to the agreement between the PSC and the ERC, to that of PP senator Carlos Alfonso Polanco, on the question of whether “the independence quota will be good for Spain”.
To the first, Montero responded that it seems “a paradox” that Vox asks for solidarity and equality, when “the two words are not in the vocabulary” of the party led by Santiago Abascal. “Equality and solidarity have nothing to do with what your group represents,” said the vice president.
And to the rest of the PP’s questions about the so-called “independence quota”, Montero reiterated that she never used those words and that it is Feijóo’s party that uses them “because the agreement has not been read”. The minister defended that the pact sealed between the ERC and the PSC for the investiture of Illa proposes “that all the autonomous communities receive a greater volume of resources” and a solidarity “that is still ignored”, she reproached the PP, “aiming for this there will be an approval of public services” of all the autonomies.
“Stop using Catalonia”
Vice President Montero reiterated in her various responses to the PP senators that they “stop using Catalonia” and abandon the policy they have defended in recent years. Questioned by Senator Polanco about the “aggression” he attributes to the pact with the ERC, Montero defended that “attacking the most vulnerable is like reducing taxes for the rich to reduce the welfare state or privatize higher education.”
Montero has repeatedly defended the regional financing proposed by Pedro Sánchez’s executive. “The main attack on tax justice in this country is what the PP is committing in the communities it governs,” the minister said. The vice president also accused these communities of being “driven by the capital effect of Madrid,” in reference to the “drift” of the reduction in taxes on the highest incomes led by President Isabel Díaz Ayuso and also carried out by Juanma Moreno in the Junta. of Andalusia.
“Do you think it is good for an autonomous community to lower taxes for the rich and then ask the State for help because it cannot pay for public services,” Montero said. The Treasury official criticized the PP for this economic policy that “the 300 billion more they received during this government did not serve the well-being of citizens,” but “revealed their incompetence in management.”
Montero defends the constitutionality of the Catalan tax system
The PP also raised the possible consequences of a “fracture” of the Public Treasury, with the aim of allowing Catalonia to collect all the taxes paid in the community presided over by the socialist Salvador Illa. In response, Montero referred to the Constitution, which allows the autonomous communities to act as collaborators of the State in the collection, management and settlement of taxes.
The head of the Treasury portfolio also asked the PP senators to consult Feijóo’s statements in 2016, “when he defended that we could talk about a concert in Catalonia”, in reference to the financing agreements of this community, or the PP’s electoral program in 2012: “it was said that Catalonia could collect all taxes”, Montero replied to Polanco, mayor of Palencia until 2019. “If you are so interested in contributing to the financing of communities and municipalities, since you are mayor of Palencia, ask that 12 billion euros not be taken from the communities and that we vote in favor of the path to stability.”
