The president of the Junta de Andalucía, Juanma Moreno, does not see the current first vice-president of the government and Minister of Finance and Civil Service, Maria Jesus Montero, PSOE candidate for the presidency of the Andalusian Executive in the next regional elections scheduled for 2026, after supporting the Catalan tax quota that he had rejected a few weeks earlier. “She cannot be a candidate because betrayed the interests of the Andalusians“, proclaimed the Andalusian president this Friday during an interview granted to the morning show ‘La Mirada Crítica’ of Telecinco, a few hours before attending an institutional meeting at the Moncloa convened by the president of the central government, Pedro Sánchez.
Maria Jesus Montero «“She became an applauder.” of the head of the National Executive and “is incapable of maintaining the minimum of coherence” in an issue that would harm Andalusia as the fiscal independence of Catalonia, stressed the Andalusian leader of the PP.
Moreno recalled that she was “radically opposed” to the proposed economic agreement launched by the Catalan Minister of Economy at the last meeting of the Fiscal and Financial Policy Council (CPFF) on July 15. A few days later, the Deputy Secretary General of the PSOE approved the agreement signed between the CPS and the ERC which planned to give the Generalitat the key to collecting all taxes paid in that territory in exchange for support for independence to make the socialist Salvador Illa president of Catalonia.
With these precedents, Moreno considers that María Jesús Montero “no longer represents Andalusia” to constantly comply” with the dictates of the President of the Government, who according to him is “obsessed with staying in power”.
Moreno considers that Montero has been invalidated as a possible replacement for the current general secretary of the Andalusian PSOE, Juan Espadasafter sources from Ferraz (federal headquarters of the party) advocated the renewal of the leadership in some territories, including Andalusia.
Asked about the questioning of the socialist leader and his possible replacement by the Sevillian minister, the Andalusian president recalled that “violated” the agreement of the Andalusian Parliament in March 2018 which she herself promoted when she was Minister of the Treasury of Andalusia to demand fair financing for Andalusia from the central Executive of Mariano Rajoy.
The pact defended by Montero and to which Juanma Moreno’s PP adhered when it was in opposition demanded up to 4,000 million euros more per year for the autonomous community in order to cover the costs of the public services system in Andalusia. The text specifies that in Spain as a whole, an additional injection of around 16 billion euros extra per year was necessary, a figure calculated taking into account the cost of these services during the years 2014 and 2015.
In his interview on Telecinco, Moreno stressed the minister’s “inconsistency” in accepting the “privileges” granted to Catalonia. In this sense, he joked that former councilor Montero would have sent a hundred buses to demonstrate at the doors of the Ministry of Finance against the Catalan tax quota.
He does not give Sanchez more than a year as president
On this issue, he also predicted that the current Sánchez government, without support to approve the general state budgetscannot continue “more than a year”“In 2025 we will be in an electoral process,” he predicted, although he considers it unrealistic that the departure of the PSOE and the executive of Sumar will occur as a result of a motion of censure supported by the PP and the Junts.
The Andalusian president described Pedro Sánchez as the leader of a A “unique, Caesarist government obsessed with staying in power”, even at the cost of “dragging” in this undertaking to a party with more than a hundred years of history, which must renounce its principles of redistribution of wealth, equity and solidarity. He stressed that in the Andalusian Parliament he had noticed that the socialist leaders “stammered” when “questioned” about the controversy over the Catalan quota, because “it goes against their principles.”
Regarding his meeting at Moncloa, he said he wanted to try to get Pedro Sánchez to “rethink and back down” from a “Catalan quota” that “makes no sense, is not constitutional and is obviously not going to bring anything good to our territorial model.”
