October 15 marked the deadline for euro zone countries to submit their budget plans for the next financial year to Brussels. Spain already announced last week that it would miss the deadline and delay the delivery of next year’s accounts. But the European Commission is not satisfied with such a delay. The community executive insisted to Spain that it submit the budgets for 2025 “as quickly as possible”.
“We hope that all euro area member states that have not yet submitted their budgetary plans, including Spain, do it as soon as possible and, in any case, before the budget project is presented to the national Parliament”, declared a spokesperson for the community. ElEconomista.es.
The European Commission is thus marking certain red lines for Spain which it does not want it to cross. He reiterates, in accordance with what he indicated last week, that October 15 is the deadline to send you next year’s accounts. And, aware of the complex national dynamics which make it impossible to conclude agreements with other political groups, he specifies that the budgetary plan must be approved by the Council of Ministers, without the need to have been approved by the Congress of Deputies.
So far, 14 of the 20 eurozone countries have presented their accounts for next year to Brussels. They count among themselves Germany, Italy or Greece, but not Spain. The deadline is not strict, but Brussels expects governments to submit their budgetary projects no later than “a few days later”, but in no case with a delay of several weeks.
The budgetary plan is structured as support for the budgetary roadmap that countries had to present for the next four years, in accordance with what is required for the application of economic governance reform from 2025. In other words, the structural budget plan that Spain sent to Brussels this week risks remaining a plan empty and incoherent without the support of budgets.
A public accounts control plan for the next four years can hardly be credible if the Spanish state does not establish a budgetary roadmap for next year. The Commissioner for the Economy, Paolo Gentiloni, spoke in this direction after hearing the news of the postponement of the accounts last week. Even though the European Commission has always been flexible when it comes to deadlines, “There are limits to this flexibility” and demanded “not to lose this link between the draft budgets and the structural budget plans”. His message was clear: the two documents “must be linked, which implies that the level of flexibility of deadlines is limited”.
Previously, the Minister of Economy, Carlos Body, had stressed that although the government would submit the budget plan to Brussels on time, before the agreed date of October 15, the same would not be true for the budget plan. “In a normal environment where we would not have this project by October 15, we would have presented a budgetary plan without economic policy measures and that will not happen because the European Commission has asked that plans accompanied by economic policy measures be presented”, It is justified to exclude the extension of the budget.
To open the way the implementation of the new budgetary rules, which establish that the levels of deficit to GDP and debt to GDP should not exceed 3% and 60% respectively, countries had to send their structural budget plans for the next four years to Brussels on September 20. Spain, like the majority of member states, has agreed with the European Commission on an extension. Finally, the delivery horizon for the debt and deficit reduction roadmap for the next four years was set for October 15, when the budgets were also due to be delivered.
