A week before the deadline set by member states to send their budget plans to Brussels, the government announces that it will delay their delivery. The European Commission did not welcome the news with much enthusiasm. If he stressed yesterday that his “flexibility is limited”, he also informed Madrid that The legal deadline for submitting budget plans is October 15.
The Community Executive wants Member States to respect the deadlines set in the months of the last part of the year which seem essential, before the new budgetary rules begin to apply in 2025, which establish that the deficit levels to GDP and debt to GDP should not exceed 3% and 60% respectively. Even if the deadline is not strict, Brussels hopes that governments will submit their budgetary projects by October 15 or a few days later.
Brussels’ expectations come up against deadlines managed by the government, which confirmed yesterday that it would be slow to submit the 2025 accounts to the European Commission. Economy Minister Carlos Body said the European Commission had asked countries to did not send extensions of budget plans, which should include measurements. Reason why Spain would postpone the presentation of its accounts.
The return at the end of the year seems demanding both for Brussels and for the Member States. With the return to the application of fiscal rules after years of suspension due to the pandemic thanks to a reformed economic governance framework, governments were required to present their four-year fiscal adjustment plans on September 20, the date Corps announced it would be postponed until October 15to deliver it with the budget plan.
However, he confirmed yesterday that although he would hand over the first documents next week, the accounts would not arrive in Brussels until later. The European Commission, in an attempt to lighten the work before the end of the year, would have asked countries to only send budgets with measures, but this It doesn’t involve much effort to work around deadlines.
The response from the Commissioner for the Economy, Paolo Gentiloni, was very clear. The “flexibility of the European Commission is limited”, he declared during a press conference following the Eurogroup held yesterday in Luxembourg. Furthermore, the structural budget plan and the budget plan must go hand in hand. In fact, presenting the roadmap for the next four years, without clear accounts for 2025, would leave Moncloa’s budgetary plan on empty paper.
The difficulty actually lies in the ability of the Spanish executive to keep certain accounts in a manner A congress where it is really difficult to consolidate support. For the moment, the budgetary path presented in July has encountered setbacks from the Junts and has not been resubmitted to Congress, as planned a week ago, due to the low number of measures to be implemented . The budget trajectory forms the basis on which budgets are then prepared. The sending of the accounts only requires the approval of the Council of Ministers to be sent to Brussels, the fiscal path is the antechamber that allows them to be traced and, subsequently, they must be submitted for processing to the Congress.
