The budget of the Generalitat will overcome today the first obstacle in the Parliament. The plenary session will debate and vote on the amendments to the totality that Junts per Catalunya, Vox, the CUP, Ciudadanos and the PP have presented to the project of Catalan accounts for 2023 and to the bill of fiscal, financial, administrative and public sector measures , known as the accompanying law.
Yesterday the deadline for registering the amendments in the Catalan Chamber expired and it is expected that the Board will admit them first thing in the morning today. The debate will start at 11 am, although the budgets will not be definitively approved until March. They will be validated with the favorable vote of Esquerra Republicana, the PSC and En Comú Podem, the three groups that today will guarantee that the accounts continue their course.
With today’s debate, the process to approve the accounts begins after the long negotiations, which began after the departure of Junts del Govern in October and the restructuring of the portfolios of the Catalan Executive.
The Government, which at first only had the support of the 33 ERC deputies and needed to have the ‘yes’ of at least 68 deputies to approve the accounts, closed a first pact with the commons on December 14. However, he still needed the support of another parliamentary group to be able to approve them, so he continued the talks with the PSC and Junts, since the CUP was ruled out and did not attend the meeting to which the Government of Pere Aragonès summoned them.
The negotiations with the Socialists stalled because they could not agree on projects such as the Hard Rock, the expansion of the El Prat airport and the B-40, which were red lines for those of Salvador Illa. The talks ran aground on January 26, when ERC announced that it was accepting the B-40 project “under the terms proposed by the PSC”, a gesture that the Socialists appreciated and began to continue talking to close the last fringes.
The final agreement between the Catalan Executive and the PSC arrived on February 1 and after three months of negotiations, and will allow the approval of some accounts that increase the resources of the Generalitat by 3,100 million euros for 2023. The budget pact does not contain any heading for the Hard Rock projects, the fourth belt and the expansion of the airport, but the Government and PSC did sign an annexed text with commitments regarding these infrastructures.
In this first debate, it is foreseeable that the plenary session will reject the amendments in their entirety and thus the forecast of maximum global income and expenses of the Budget will be established, and the bill will continue its parliamentary processing in the committees, after which the final project will return to the plenary session and the final debate and vote will be held on March 10, according to the scheduled schedule.
The plenary session this Tuesday starts at 11 a.m. with the intervention of the Minister of Economy, Natàlia Mas, after which it will be the turn of the groups that have submitted an amendment to the entirety –Junts, Vox, CUP, Cs and PP –, and then they will speak PSC, ERC and common.
Throughout the debate, the members of the Government who request it will be able to intervene and thus open a reply turn, and once the debate is over, all the amendments will be voted together.
After the debate will be held on the entire accompanying law, Minister Mas will intervene again, followed by the groups that have submitted amendments to the entirety and those that have not.
