Oxygen for the Generalitat's coffers

The decision of Forgive 17.1 billion euros of the Generalitat's debt to the State through the FLA This represents the fulfilment of one of the agreements between ERC and the PSOE that allowed the investiture of Pedro Sánchez and also represents a breath of fresh air for the coffers of the Generalitat, since in this way it will save some 1.5 billion euros in interest, according to the calculation made public by Oriol Junqueras. The Ministry of Finance has extended this forgiveness to the rest of the autonomous communities with criteria that, curiously, make Andalusia the most benefited (18.8 billion) and that after Catalonia come the Valencian Community (11.21 billion) and the Community of Madrid (8.644 billion). In this way, María Jesús Montero manages to put the men The PP's regional governments are in a bind, since if they listen to what their president, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, and the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, say, they will vote against it. However, the measure will most likely be approved in Congress and then it will be necessary to see whether these communities accept it or not. Not doing so would be to harm their own citizens for a political reason.

The FLA issue deserves a separate reflection. Let us remember that, given the impossibility of approving a new regional financing system, the PP launched this mechanism to finance the autonomous communities during the economic crisis, which caused a drastic fall in tax revenues while at the same time an increase in demand for social services. But Cristóbal Montoro's FLA was not free. It was a loan with much better conditions than those allowed by the market at that time, it is obvious, but ultimately that money caused interest that the Generalitat had to pay to the State every year. In the case of Catalonia, an underfunded territory with a fiscal deficit estimated at around 20 billion euros per year, this system was insulting, since the State took money from you which it then lent you, charging you interest. That is why Junqueras said on Monday that "the FLA should never have existed", since that money should have been transferred without any compensation, because it was necessary to pay for services such as education and health.

In reality, what Montero is now proposing is an accounting trick, since the 83.252 million euros that have been forgiven will go from being the debt of the autonomous communities to being the debt of the State, which in total is still 102% of GDP. Of course, the State is giving up collecting 4,000 million euros in interest from the autonomous communities. This is, therefore, the real forgiveness. It is also true that getting rid of 20% of the debt now allows the Generalitat to improve its rating in the eyes of the markets. In any case, this is, together with the twenty agreements of the Bilateral Commission (the most important being the increase in the number of Mossos to 25,000 in 2030), a step that has a direct impact on improving the living conditions of the citizens of Catalonia. And this is always positive.