He The Government has resumed, after a slight break, negotiations with the different parliamentary groups who supported the investiture of Pedro Sánchez for the approval of the General State Budgets for 2025, according to different sources from different parties. These contacts have allowed some of these forces to now be “more optimistic” than a couple of weeks ago that the public accounts can finally be ratified and the legislature settled until the end of the mandate, as the always prudent spokesperson even admitted in public this Friday. from the PNV, Aitor Esteban, who linked that possibility to the growing nerves in Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s PP. Sources from other groups endorsed this position and that everything happens because Junts, with whom conversations have multiplied, obtains some compensation for Catalonia.
“There is an investiture agreement that we want the Spanish Government to complement. “If there is no Budget, the legislature becomes complicated, but our intention is to continue supporting the Executive,” the PNV parliamentary spokesperson indicated in an interview on RNE and one of the rising leaders in that formation even in the face of the next renewal in its leadership. Esteban thus confirmed that the PNV resumes this negotiation, after a few weeks on hold, with a good disposition and “more optimistic” and hopeful both on a bilateral level and with respect to the other investiture partners.
The Executive now lives with some very expansive public accounts scheduled for 2023 that were approved in Congress in November 2022 with the support of 10 parties (PSOE, Unidas Podemos, ERC, PNV, EH Bildu, PDeCAT, Más País, Canarian Coalition, Compromís and PRC) validated by the EU and with powerful record social spending of 266,719 million euros. The president himself, Pedro Sánchez, in an unexpected turn, gave the order at the last minute of stop the vote at the end of September on the deficit path prior to the Budget in the face of the foreseeable defeat due to not having the votes of Junts to give yourself another margin of time in that negotiation. There have even been meetings in Switzerland between members of the PSOE and the leader of Junts, Carles Puigdemont, but leaders of that formation continue to warn La Moncloa that they are not part of any bloc and that they will only lend their six decisive votes if they achieve more. benefits and powers for Catalonia, in addition to putting on the table the demand for million-dollar figures to be completed from items not spent in previous budgets.
When Esteban was expressly asked this Friday about the apparently distanced positions between members of the Junts leadership, another of the key allies and who has been receiving confusing messages for a few days about his involvement in the continuity of the legislature, the Basque leader pointed out: “If someone supports an investiture it is to try to make things work, not to be tripping all the time.”
The PNV spokesperson also conceded that if in the end Junts and the other investiture allies support the 2025 Budget, it will be more than likely that Pedro Sánchez will complete his mandate and reach the 1,000 days that the president maintains he has left in La Moncloa and was That’s when he took the opportunity to send something more than a warning to Feijóo’s current PP, from whom he admitted that in his party they are now more distanced than two years ago when this legislature began due to the bad “gestures” that the popular leader and his team that he sees transplanted with their ways of “absolute majority from Galicia” and because of how they are “muddying” the country’s political climate with accusations and unsupported judicial actions. “Perhaps the PP has been able to sense that there are possibilities for this budget to go ahead, so that, even if it were in fits and starts, the Government could more or less finish the legislature. And that is what makes him nervous and he is acting in an absolutely exaggerated way,” Esteban concluded.
These “optimistic” perceptions about the Budgets of Aitor Esteban and the PNV are validated by other parties that supported Sánchez’s investiture in November 2023, such as the BNG, which emphasizes “that same impression” in official sources. In ERC and the BNG, for example, their appeals are constant for the government coalition of the PSOE and Sumar not to waste this opportunity to legislate and apply more progressive and left-wing reforms in the BOE and they completely distance themselves from any other alternative. Of course, in ERC they specify that their dialogue is now stopped, waiting for their congress to be held at the end of this month, when they have to renew their leadership.
This is also the case of EH Bildu, which confirms that its vision of the future of the Budgets for 2025 is now more “optimistic”. Official sources from the Abertzale group remark: “Budget negotiations are quite advanced. We have resumed the talks where they left off in March and our desire is to reach a good agreement that responds to the needs of the Basques. We will see how the next few weeks go, but the predisposition is positive.”
In the Canary Coalition, which co-governs the islands with the PP, it is also confirmed that they are already talking again with the Government but without moving forward, until they know the details of the Budgets, what the meaning of their vote could be and waiting for what is signed in their bilateral agreements is also fulfilled. One of the theoretical partners who is emphasizing these days more its distancing from the Executive, both the PSOE and Sumar, is Podemos with increasingly harsh interventions from its general secretary and former minister, Ione Belarra.
