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 an initial setback 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 margin than they have with the current ones – the Treasury estimates it at an additional 5,849 million euros. Sources from the Spanish government insist that PP, Vox, and Junts say "no to "an improvement for the autonomous communities" and warn that they will be the most affected because "they will not have borrowing capacity". Next week, in a new extraordinary plenary session, there will be a second and final attempt to approve the stability path. If it definitively lapses, as is foreseeable, the Spanish government will be forced to set the objectives from the previous budget 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%. The Junts deputy 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 will not have budgets", as they do not have a parliamentary majority to push them through. In this regard, the PP deputy José Vicente Marí has called for elections and stressed that the "no" to the stability path is a vote against "the very existence of this incapable government".