Governing without a budget: a regime change?
"A government without a budget is a government that governs nothing," said Pedro Sánchez in March 2018. And in November 2022, Salvador Illa reproached Pere Aragonès for "Catalonia not having an approved budget given everything that's happening in the world." Of course, circumstances have changed; both were in the opposition then and are in power today. Now the Spanish president deludedly says he will fulfill his obligation, and the Minister of Economy, Alícia Romero, asserts that if there is no budget, "the world won't end, nor will Catalonia fall." These are two different ways of getting by, marked one by the optimism of the will and the other by the pessimism of reason, as Gramsci would say.
There is no doubt that both governments, the Spanish and the Catalan, are violating the constitutional and statutory mandate to present the draft budget to Parliament. The immediate effect of this is the neutralization of the parliamentary chambers, which are prevented from exercising some of their basic functions: approving the accounts and overseeing the executive branch. Not surprisingly, budget debate and votes are the tools par excellence that allow the opposition to express its disagreement with the government's political orientation, more so than general debates like the one this week in Parliament. Losing a budget vote means, even conventionally, having to dissolve the chamber and call elections, following the pure logic of Pedro Sánchez, echoing what he did in 1996 when he lacked the necessary support.
It's true that without a budget, it's difficult to govern. In Spain, the last approved budget was for 2022, and in the Principality, for 2023, in a very different domestic and international political context than the one we will find ourselves in in 2026. It's equally true that the world doesn't end here. In Spain, the 2025 extension will be the eleventh in democracy, and in Catalonia, the sixth. This year, the Minister of Finance modified appropriations in the extended budget worth 38 billion euros, and in Catalonia, in 2025, almost 4 billion euros were allocated. However, what is an exceptional and urgent measure cannot be a custom, considering, moreover, that the extension does not have as many legal limitations as is often claimed.
Some jurists believe that this approach is leading to a constitutional (and statutory) mutation because, despite the constitutional and statutory mandate, what was previously understood as an obligation has now become a mere option. This conflicts with the fact that our parliamentary form of government establishes a system in which the executive branch is legitimized if its program enjoys majority support in the chamber. The opposite is another system, negative parliamentarism, according to which the government only needs tacit support consisting of a series of specific agreements with various groups that are repelled by the alternative political force. In this model, the government has no other plan than to survive by any means necessary. And some say that the mutation entails moving from a parliamentary to a presidential system.
In my opinion, the non-compliance is clear, but the legal system doesn't provide for any legal sanction in the form of automatic dissolution of Parliament or the obligation to raise a vote of confidence, as occurs in city councils. This could be achieved by changing the rules of the game. Meanwhile, the sanction is purely political, which means the opposition has no other recourse than to protest. However, the opposition also bears some responsibility in all of this: after all, it's reasonable to assume that investiture agreements are for four years, because they facilitate the election of a candidate and support a program in exchange for compensation that the government must have the time and means to implement.
