Autonomous communities and municipalities could start the year 2025 losing more than 12 billion euros in tax margin. The parliamentary dance initiated by the Government and the Juntas around a new path of stability, which will mark the deficit objectives and the foundations of the budgetary project, threatens to reduce the spending capacity promised to regional and municipal governmentscommitted to approving the Accounts, which – strictly speaking – must guarantee a surplus of 0.1%. Everything could change with the year already underway. If the Treasury redoes the fiscal objectives, by reorganizing the distribution of the deficit – 2.5% for all administrations – in favor of the Autonomous Communities, the autonomy will have an extraordinary margin that we will not know until next October 15, when the The economy will be forced to include the data in the structural budget plan which must be sent to the European Commission. In the meantime, the regions are working blindly.
La Moncloa has three months to promote a budget roadmap and process a complete budget project; however, two appointments will slow down the deadlines. The head of the Executive, Pedro Sánchez, warned -last week- that the Treasury would not present the accounts before the holding of the ERC and Puigdemont party congressesscheduled for the end of October and November respectively. This reduces the parliamentary window to comply “in a timely manner” with the approval of the standard, as Montero proposed. However, the emergence of the pro-independence conclaves will leave the first vice-president with a little less than a month to deal with the entire bill. An impossible mission, knowing that in 2022, it took more than a month and a half to promote the 2023 Accounts, despite the maximum acceleration of deadlines in Congress.
Everything now leads to a temporary extension of budgets, which – if not corrected – will affect all Autonomous Communities and Town Halls. This will happen more in regions with the highest GDP volume. The Community of Madrid and Catalonia could cease to have a spending margin of between 600 and 2.2 billion euros in 2025, depending on the final deficit objective that marks the future path to stability. The same thing will happen with Andalusia or Valencia, and with municipalities like Madrid which, if the budgets are not approved, would see spending more than 200 million, if we take as reference the latest fiscal roadmap approved by the Council of Ministers, more than fifteen days.
A complex negotiation
Its modification does not depend only on Junts. Other groups, such as Bildu and the BNG, have also asked to intervene in the negotiations during which the final distribution of the public deficit will be decided. “As part of our budgetary regulations, these 2.5% must be distributed between the different territorial agents, between the State, the Autonomous Communities, the Town Halls and Social Security. And it is within this framework of discussion that we we are currently finding,” Economy Minister Carlos Body confirmed on Friday.
The greater the margin ceded to the Autonomous Communities and the municipalities, the greater the adjustment that the State will be forced to undertake. With a deficit trajectory of 0.1% for the regions, the government would assume – on its own – a reduction of 0.8%. If Puigdemont manages to have his proposal accepted by the Executive and a deficit target of 0.8% is granted to the autonomous communities, the State will have to undertake a fiscal effort of more than 12 billion euros, according to data published by the director of Fedea, Ángel de la Fuente.
To this must be added the price that the different groups charge Moncloa in exchange for their support for the 2025 budgets. “We must have a lot of dialogue, to the point of exhaustion, with all the political groups in the parliamentary arc “. said the first vice-president, María Jesús Montero, from Cádiz. Several of the ongoing reforms that Moncloa must undertake also depend on the accounts. One of them is the tax reform which – among other things – validates the permanence of extraordinary taxes on the banking sector and energy, which made it possible to collect 2,859 million euros in 2024.
