The Madrid City Council promises to lower taxes in 2023. At the moment it has not detailed what they will be, and has not even opened the round of negotiations, but the tax reduction is the great claim of the mayor of the capital, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, to add the support that the coalition of PP and Cs needs to carry out the accounts
This has been advanced by Almeida in statements to the media at the Palacio de Cibeles, where he pointed out that “it is obvious” that the corporation will reinforce social spending whose item exceeded last year, and for the first time, 1,000 million euros .
The councilor has slipped that the people of Madrid “should know that they are going to pay less IBI, that the bonuses established in the pandemic are going to be maintained and that they will be able to verify that there is going to be a reorganization of rates”, but he did not want to detail any of the new measures that he is considering: “We will continue to lower taxes, we will not increase the City Council’s debt and we will not leave anyone behind”.
The first formal step of the 2023 accounts is to approve the budgets this Thursday and then carry out the procedures and, once they have it, sit down to negotiate. “Whoever does not want to sit down, explain it to the people of Madrid,” Almeida warned, to whom the accounts do not come out only with the votes of Citizens.
The need for external support is notorious. And the deputy mayor of Madrid, Begoña Villacís (Cs), has stated that if she has to call the three councilors of the Mixed Group, or each of the Cibeles councilors, “in order” to talk about the 2023 accounts, she will do so. , because the city “needs” some budgets next year.
PP and Ciudadanos carried out the 2021 accounts with Vox, but after the breakdown of relations, in 2022 they had to do it with the Mixed Group, which is made up of three mayors split from Más Madrid: José Manuel Calvo, Luis Cueto and Marta Higueras . Although this formula is also up in the air and the orange formation reserves its own round of contacts regardless of the one made by the PP.
“To begin with, there has been talk of the Popular Party. Is the PP the only party that governs the city of Madrid? You know perfectly well that it is not. Two parties govern, one is PP and one is Cs. Vox has been in charge of saying that The PP does not keep its promises. I am in charge of telling you that the PP, to govern Madrid, had to agree with Ciudadanos and give up fulfilling part of its program, “as the deputy mayor had to do. “It is, therefore, a consensus agreement, the spirit with which the city is governed,” she added.
The spokeswoman for Más Madrid, Rita Maestre, believes that the 2023 budgets, which the Government of José Luis Martínez-Almeida will preliminarily approve this Thursday, will not go ahead, because the mayor “is not trustworthy” even for his priority partners nor for the rest of the municipal groups and does not have “enough” support.
“On the budgets, one more press conference in which I cannot give you any new news from this municipal group, or from any opposition group. As far as I know, none of us have received any information about it or any calls to negotiate”, said Maestre in the last few hours.
In fact, Maestre believes that this negotiation, which arouses so many “mentions” in the Government, “will never exist” and has dared to say that “the budgets will not go ahead”.
