The secretary general of the PSOE-A, Juan Espadas, regretted this Friday that the president of the Council, Juanma Moreno (PP), “did not respond to what the Andalusians expect” during their meeting at the Moncloa Palace as part of the series of contacts opened by Pedro Sánchez with the regional presidents because “today It was time to work, not just complain“and, according to him, he preferred to attend the meeting”with the arguments of the PP and Mr. Feijóo and to confront Catalonia and the President of the Government.”
In the statements released by the PSOE-A after the meeting between Sánchez and Moreno, Espadas described the Moncloa meeting as “good news from an institutional point of view” because “dialogue and collaboration between administrations is the only way forward”, but he regretted that the President of the Council “did not live up to expectations of what the Andalusians expected of him.
According to him, Moreno should have presented a “proposal for a financing model that Andalusia would present to the Spanish government to build a scenario in which a fairer and more equitable distribution would be resolved for serve public services in Andalusia compared to other autonomous communities, which, at present and with the expiration of the current financing model, is clearly not what Andalusia deserves.
Faced with this, Espadas assured that Moreno had made a “massive political error” by choosing to carry “the argument of the PP of Feijóo” and “using the confrontation with another territory like Catalonia to use new territorial grievance“instead of putting forward a proposal that would allow us to “move forward with a financing model in which we can all feel well reflected.”
“This is what happens when you follow a strategy that only benefits Feijóo and this clearly harms the Andalusians,” insisted the leader of the PSOE-A, who stressed that Moreno had had it “quite easy” to put on the table a proposal based on the agreement reached in the Andalusian Parliament in 2018.
After having dissented the President of the Council who preferred to put “a list of pending things that the General Administration of the State of Andalusia has in his opinion”, Espadas defended that the meeting in Moncloa “was the day for him to have said how Moreno Bonilla believes that equality, solidarity, justice and equity can be resolved from the point of view of redistribution in a tax system like the Spanish one.”
“MORENO WAS RADICALLY WRONG”
“He did not do it, I do not know if because he is not clear or because he does not dare to verbalize it, because neither Feijóo nor the other regional presidents of the PP would support him, but his responsibility today was to defend “Andalusia and the interests of the Andalusians, not to defend the position of the PP, and I think that there they made a radical mistake”, he stressed.
He also criticized Moreno for speaking of “mistreatment of Andalusia” with the Sánchez government when it is an “indisputable reality” that the community “has received 48% more funding from the general state budget than it received with the Rajoy government” and the central Executive has transferred “infinitely more resources” for public services such as education, health or dependency.
He also criticized Moreno’s position on immigration and assured that the president of the Council should have transmitted to Sánchez his “commitment to contribute to the conclusion of an agreement for the reform of the immigration law” that would allow a distribution of minors who could arrive with “more economic resources to the autonomous communities to meet the needs of what this arrival of minors means.”
For all this, Espadas concluded that Moreno “has lost an opportunity to demonstrate that he is a political leader who lives up to what it means to represent the Andalusians and lives up to what Andalusia means in terms of political weight in Spain as a country” all for having followed the manual and the arguments of his party and Mr. Feijóo.
“Today, the Andalusians were waiting for a president with a fair proposal, which shows that a model is possible without confronting and generating more conflicts with Catalonia and that would lead us to advance in the protection of public services,” he stressed before warning Moreno of that “today it was time to work, not just to complain.”
