The first step for the State's budgets fails: PP, Vox and Junts reject the path of stability in Congress

MadridA week after the Spanish government activated the mechanism to present the State budgets for 2027, Congress will deliver a first blow to Pedro Sánchez's initiative. The PP, Vox, and Junts will block the stability path, one of the mandatory steps to bring the accounts to the Spanish chamber this autumn. However, despite this initial parliamentary failure, the Spanish executive can still move forward with the process. And it will do so in the face of a defeat in Congress that Moncloa had already accepted and which will not alter its plans. "Some will try to present this vote as a victory or defeat for the government, but they are mistaken. The real question is whether the autonomous communities will have more resources," argued the Minister of Finance, Arcadi España, during the debate in the lower house.

What will be voted on in the extraordinary plenary session this Tuesday afternoon are new stability objectives (deficit and debt), which give the autonomous communities more fiscal room than they have under current ones –The Treasury puts it at an additional 5,849 million euros–. Sources from the Spanish government insist that PP, Vox, and Junts are saying "no" to "an improvement for the autonomous communities" and warn that they will be the main ones affected because "they will not be able to dispose of borrowing capacity". Next week, in a new extraordinary plenary session, there will be a second and final attempt to approve the stability route. If it is definitively abandoned, as is foreseeable, the Spanish government will be forced to set the objectives of the previous budgetary year.

Spain's arguments have not convinced Junts, which maintains that the proposal "is once again a scam for Catalonia" and argues that the deficit authorized for the autonomous communities should be raised to 0.6% –the Spanish government's proposal is for it to be 0.1%–. Junts MP Josep Maria Cruset has also criticized that activating this first step for the State budgets is a "marketing operation". According to Cruset, Sánchez's executive is "acting" because "everyone knows they won't have budgets", as they do not have a parliamentary majority to push them through. In this regard, PP MP José Vicente Marí has called for elections and has emphasized that the "no" to the stability route is a vote against "the very existence of this incapable government".