The PP mayors, against Sánchez: "They have taken 1.3 billion from us to dedicate to defense"
Barcelona"Sánchez has taken 1,300 million euros from your financing to dedicate it to defense". The Deputy Secretary of Autonomous and Local Coordination of the PP, Elías Bendodo, has fueled the indignation of the local world against the Spanish government by taking advantage of the gathering of mayors that the popular ones have organized this Tuesday in Barcelona. Last Tuesday, the Council of Ministers approved the transfer of credit of 1,300 million euros destined for Defense, without specifying where the money would come from. The PP points out, as some media outlets have already done, that they will do so from allocations that should go to the local world.
The Mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, has called the maneuver unacceptable for daily management: "It is incomprehensible that 1,300 million euros are taken from local financing to dedicate it to Defense expenses". The statements underline a deep fracture between the will of the municipalities to attend to basic services and a state policy that prioritizes military spending over the solvency of the town councils.
Barcelona has become this Tuesday the board on which the Popular Party has played its cards in the municipal sphere to establish a common position in defense of "fair local financing". With the presence of mayors with their own political weight such as Almeida himself or Xavier García Albiol, from Badalona, the day has served to coordinate the claims of the town councils before a state government that they consider "disdains municipalism". The objective is to mark a turning point in the defense of local autonomy, demanding that town halls stop being the "poor brothers" of the administration and regain control over resources to meet the real needs of the street.
The debate has culminated in the analysis of "the financial asphyxia of town halls", limited by the legal impossibility of incurring debt despite having sound accounts, a measure approved, precisely, in 2012, under the government of Mariano Rajoy and with Cristóbal Montoro as Minister of Finance. The great demand has been the use of treasury surpluses for social investments, "such as housing construction", a request that they will take next month to the meeting with the Ministry of Finance. A meeting that they have claimed, not as a voluntary political concession from the Spanish government, but as a "judicial victory", stated María José García-Pelayo, president of the Spanish Federation of Municipalities and Provinces, who recalled the harshness of the process: "We have had to go to the National Court for the government to summon us".
