The Government was planning to put to a vote the same budget spending ceiling that sank in July this Thursday in the Congress of Deputies, but anticipating the same result, it has decided to rectify. The Government withdrew yesterday from the agenda the vote on the stability path, thus avoiding chaining another parliamentary setback and making another defeat visible in the chamber.
“There is room for negotiation,” they explain in the PSOE, which now seems willing to offer Junts new concessions. To start with, two investigative commissions that had already been committed to Junts but had not started were activated in Congress yesterday, while the Spanish Foreign Minister insisted in Europe that for Spain it is a priority for the Catalan language to also be used in Europe.
However, it does not seem that reaching that agreement will be easy due to the maximum demands imposed by Junts: the post-convergents want the autonomous communities to keep one-third of the deficit capacity of all Public Administrations (made up of the State, autonomous communities, municipalities, and Social Security). In this way, the autonomous communities would go from keeping 0.1% of the deficit to 0.8% of GDP (last year they had 0.9%), which would mean a substantial increase in absolute terms: from the current €1.6 billion to around 13 billion, that is, about 11.4 billion more. Catalonia, in this sense, would gain more spending capacity (in this case, borrowing capacity): it is estimated that, with the 2.5% deficit projected by the Government, all administrations will have around €38 billion, but Sánchez wants to keep 96% for the State (2.2%) and Social Security (0.2%) and leave the autonomous communities (0.1%) and municipalities (0%) with hardly any margin. The post-convergents are asking for the autonomous communities to keep one-third of the deficit capacity.
