Spain will delay sending the budget plan to Brussels. The Minister of Economy, Carlos Body, confirmed that this document, which the European Commission must analyze, will not be sent by October 15, as stipulated by European standards, in the absence of precision on the budgets generals of the State for 2025. , the presentation of which did not take place due to lack of support to advance them. What the head of finance guaranteed is that the Government will send the budget plan, which is the multi-year plan planned to respect the rules of community stability once fiscal discipline is suspended during the pandemic and the crisis left by the war in Ukraine.
Body justified its delay by saying that on October 15, the Government would not have a structured plan of measures that would be incorporated into next year’s accounts, even if the plan corresponding to a budgetary extension could be presented. The minister assured that the scenario managed by the Executive is to present new accounts and not to extend the current ones (which have already been extended once). In any case, he linked the sending of the documentation to Brussels to the presentation of the budgets.
Indeed, in September the government reinstated the ceiling on non-financial spending and the stability objectives, which had been rejected in Congress this summer with the vote against Junts, who joined PP and Vox. This is the preliminary step to begin the development of the General State Budgets (PGE) for 2025.
“Regarding the budgetary plan, in a normal environment for which on October 15 we do not have this draft of general state budgets, we had presented a budgetary plan without economic policy measures and this will not happen because the Commission asked that he be present in the plans with economic policy measures,” Body explained upon his arrival in Luxembourg, where he is participating in a meeting with his counterparts from the euro zone (Eurogroup).
“We still have time. Here too, the European Commission has until the end of November to carry out an evaluation of the medium-term structural budgetary plans, that is to say of the environment in which we operate”, added the minister, who did not has not specified the precise date on which it intends to prepare the budgetary plan (and therefore the presentation of the public accounts).
He also did not want to give details of the medium-term financial plan, only guaranteeing that he is in talks on this subject with the community government. “This is compatible with respecting the objectives in terms of the spending rule of the new budgetary rules,” he said about the trajectory of the public deficit approved in July. This path establishes that Spain will end this year with a deficit of 3%, which is the threshold established by the Stability and Growth Pact and which served the European Commission to get the country out of excessive deficit files, despite which last year was exceeded. of six tenths. The tax administration which advises the EU government questioned the decision, saying it applied “discretionary power” in the case of Spain.
