The curse of budgets

Since Pere Aragonès approved his latest budget in 2023 after tough negotiations with the PSC (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party), it seems that the Catalan accounts are cursed. First, it was Comuns (Comuns), which overturned the 2024 budget, leading to early elections and the fall of Aragonès. Then it was ERC (Republican Workers' Party), with Oriol Junqueras recently re-elected as party president, who refused to approve the 2025 budget. And the veto now remains in place for the 2026 budget, where the hottest issue is in the kitchen sink.

In the latter case, the deadlock remains pending the proposal made by Vice President María Jesús Montero, who will also be the Socialist candidate in Andalusia, on regional financing and the PSOE's support for the legislative changes necessary for Catalonia to collect all personal income tax. These are the two conditions that ERC has set for sitting down at the table and negotiating the budget. Even in an optimistic scenario where both conditions are met, these accounts would be unlikely to be approved in a timely manner.

We will have to wait until the next few weeks to see whether or not budget negotiations begin. However, it is legitimate to wonder whether the parties are not abusing the formula of blocking budgets as a political strategy. It is understood that the parties always try to get the maximum benefit, and that budget negotiations are an ideal scenario to achieve this, but at the end of the day, they must put the general interest above partisan interests.

A good example of what would be responsible action in this regard is the one carried out by the ERC and Comunes in Barcelona City Council, where the process to approve the accounts has been launched and there seems to be goodwill on the part of all. It's true that administrations have grown accustomed to, and, to a certain extent, have prepared to function as normally as possible without accounts, but that doesn't mean it isn't an anomaly that forces departments to perform a certain accounting tightrope walk and prevents them from effectively deploying all the policies that would be necessary at a time like the present.

It should be noted that it's true that the Generalitat can approve credit supplements, which are a substitute, but this is a clumsy formula that doesn't allow for completely normal operation. They are patches that allow for the financing of some specific projects, but they don't allow for a global redefinition of public finances.

But while in Catalonia there's still some possibility of approving budgets, since it depends only on ERC and Comuns, in the Spanish government it's practically nonexistent, because it has to bring many more actors into agreement, from Junts to Podemos. The possibility that Sánchez will not be able to approve any budget during this term is more real than ever, and it is undoubtedly a democratic anomaly, but the PP should remember that it has several men without accounts due to the Vox veto (Andalusia and Aragon) and others, such as Isabel Díaz Ayuso, who didn't have one for three consecutive years. Political fragmentation has led to hellish arithmetic, and the ones who lose without budgets are always the citizens.