If nothing changes, the Generalitat’s budgets will not make it past the first cut. The fourth meeting between the Government of the Generalitat and Junts per Catalunya to address this issue, which was held last Thursday, did not change the panorama and nothing has moved since then. For this reason, the JxCat group in the Parliament, as planned and had warned, registered this Monday an amendment to the entire draft account of the Catalan Executive.
As of today, the budgets are only guaranteed the support of the PSC and if there is no unexpected twist in the script in two days, on Wednesday, they will fall in plenary session, when the amendments to all the groups are debated. All opposition forces, except the socialists, have amended the budgets. Thus, the post-convergents join the commons, the CUP, PP, Vox and Ciudadanos.
Despite having already presented the amendment, there is still room to withdraw it before Wednesday’s plenary session. In that sense, the spokesperson and vice president of the party, Josep Rius, has indicated that the veto “responds to the lack of dialogue and the lack of will to agree” of the Government, although he has admitted that “it can be withdrawn” if the Executive accepts its conditions, especially those related to tax reduction: the inheritance bonus and a reduction and deflation of personal income tax.
“It is a preventive amendment, we have the will to negotiate until the last minute,” Rius summarized this Monday at a press conference. “Our predisposition has not been reciprocated neither in substance nor in form on the part of the Government,” denounced the parliamentary spokesperson for JxCat, Mònica Sales. “The Government prefers that there be no budgets rather than agreeing on them with Junts,” the deputy concluded.
The party had already registered last week an amendment to the entire law of accompaniment and fiscal measures and today it did the same with the bills on the horn, when the deadline to do so was running out. On Wednesday, in the control session with President Pere Aragonès, given the complex situation and the disagreement with the commons, JxCat reached out to the Catalan president to negotiate the accounts, with the condition of eliminating the inheritance tax. “Less bureaucracy and less taxes,” claimed the president of JxCat in Parliament, Albert Batet. Aragonès picked up the gauntlet and there was a meeting. In any case, the Government rejected that demand and other tax reductions requested by the post-convergents, such as an additional 0.5% to the already planned lower income tax bracket in the autonomous part. The Executive argued that the impact of subsidizing inheritances would be 358 million euros for the Catalan public coffers. In addition, the reduction in personal income tax would mean another 138 million euros less.
At this time, with the accounts already registered with the institution, there is hardly any room to change the budget items. But there was the possibility of modifying the accompanying law and fiscal measures via amendments. Even so, the Government rejected that option and assured that of the more than 100 measures requested by Junts, more than 70% have been accepted.
