While the Parliament is blocked in Congress due to the lack of parliamentary support from Junts, Pedro Sánchez wanted to send this Wednesday a message of optimism regarding the future of his mandate and his government actions. “There has been a government for a long time. If this framework has learned anything, it is to sail against the wind. And we will take advantage of the time as we have always done,” he said at the opening ceremony of the political course at the Cervantes Institute.
Without going into details, the President of the Government outlined some of the guidelines on which he will base the action of the Executive in the coming months. Sánchez announced, for example, tax reforms that will strengthen a more equitable distribution of taxes.
“We will continue to move towards a more progressive tax system, with taxes that weigh on those who have the most and that guide the production model. We will launch new actions aimed at limiting the disproportionate privileges of certain elites and taxing those who already have enough money in the bank to live a hundred lives. We will do this, I insist, not to harm millionaires, but to protect the middle and working classes from an unjust system,” he promised.
The president did not explicitly refer to the fiscal pact concluded between the PSC and the ERC that involves the reform of Catalan financing and that of all the territories, but he devoted a good part of his speech to highlighting the fiscal policies of the PP governments as the real causes of territorial inequalities and promising that the reform, even without going into detail, will be a guarantee of interterritorial solidarity.
“Decentralization is perfectly compatible with ensuring solidarity and equity between territories, as well as ensuring the sufficiency of resources, provided that regional governments assume greater fiscal co-responsibility. In fact, I assure you, I am committed to ensuring that with the reform that we will propose, all the autonomous communities of the country will receive more resources than they received while the PP was in power,” he assured.
Sánchez indicated that the objective of this reform is to “double the resources of the main solidarity tool included in our Constitution, which is the Interterritorial Compensation Fund”, in order to guarantee equality of resources between territories.
During his speech, the leader of the Executive reviewed the financial policy of his Government regarding the resources of the Autonomous Communities in comparison with the last central administration of the PP in the hands of Mariano Rajoy. “In these seven years, the Spanish Government will have transferred a total of 935 billion euros to the Autonomous Communities; that is, 300 billion more (32%) than what the Rajoy government transferred in the same period. We comply. The problem is that the autonomies governed by the right have not dedicated these resources to the citizens. They have dedicated them to increasing the contracts of a few companies and financing their tax gifts to the richest,” he noted.
“Think, for example, about the case of the Community of Madrid,” he continued. “Between 2018 and 2023, the Madrid community received almost 100 billion euros from the Spanish government. 21% more than what the Rajoy government transferred to it. But, at the same time, its tax cuts, always intended to benefit the highest incomes, reduced Madrid’s income by 31 billion euros. In other words: of the 10 euros that the Spanish government gave to the Community of Madrid to improve the lives of the people of Madrid, the regional government used 3 to give tax gifts to the rich,” he criticized.
Sánchez also supported the idea that the Ministry of Finance is already working to present a draft General State Budget to the Congress of Deputies, even though it is not able to obtain the necessary parliamentary support to carry it out. And he announced that next Tuesday, the Council of Ministers will approve the spending ceiling again to send it back to Parliament.
