The budgets of the Junta de Andalucía for 2025 will be approved for the first time in balanced budget. In other words, no new net debt will be generated and revenues must match planned expenses. This situation, which further reduces the monetary margin available for public services or investments, is due to the lack of agreement in Congress on the new trajectory of the deficit. And it can be even worse. If there is no change in the support available to the ministry, Andalusia will have to correct its accounts so that they close in surplus, renouncing 200 million euros in spending.
The absence of a clear deficit criterion is one of the uncertainties that the Andalusian Treasury assumed when preparing the budget. At this time, it is legally up to you to approve it, like the rest of the autonomy, with a surplus of 0.1%. In other words, income must exceed expenses by several million euros.
However, the Ministry of Finance proposed an alternative to the autonomous communities: correct this criterion to give more margin and set a deficit of 0.1%. The PP, along with a majority of the opposition, canceled the measure in Congress, so it never came into force.
While waiting to reach an agreement, the Andalusian government opted for a “cautious” criterion and stayed somewhere between the two. He opted for a balanced budget, an approach which implies that he may have to correct in the coming months by giving up 200 million euros.
“A territory like Andalusia, which lacks 1.5 billion euros each year, cannot have a surplus budget where we have money left to give to the government. We believed it was reasonable to do it in a balanced way and if it turns out later that we need to achieve a surplus, it should not be a big problem,” explained the Minister of the Economy, of Finance and European Funds, Carolina España.
