The Minister of Finance, Ruth Merino, assures that the Valencian Community will receive around 1,800 million euros less due to the extension of the General State Budgets assumed by the Government of Pedro Sánchez before the electoral call in Catalonia. For Merino, it is a “very great irresponsibility” that has disastrous consequences for the Valencian territory, because it means “slamming the door” on the temporary leveling fund that the Consell requests to compensate for under-financing, in addition to freezing investments that according to the spokesperson councilor “were already bad, especially for Alicante”.
Ruth Merino regrets that the “submission of the Sánchez Government to the pro-independence parties” and its refusal to continue with the preparation of the General State Budgets (PGE) for 2024 will have an impact of 1,793 million euros for the citizens of the Valencian Community , since the extension of the 2023 PGE implies the freezing of the resources of the regional financing system for this year.
According to the councilor, Sánchez’s “irresponsibility” of evading the constitutional mandate to prepare the PGE by not having secured the support of the Catalan independence parties to approve them after the call for elections in Catalonia represents a “serious detriment to the autonomous communities.” .
They defend that the communities will not receive the updated payments on account in accordance with the forecasts communicated by the Ministry of Finance itself and that, at the same time, this will “significantly” reduce the settlement for the 2022 financial year, which is paid in 2024, because several of the funds that comprise it are budgetary in nature and with the extension they cannot increase.
“Although the Minister of Finance boasts that the autonomous communities will receive the best financing in their history this year, the reality is that this has not yet translated into an improvement in income this year and this will not be the case as long as the Government do not update these deliveries,” the Minister of Finance detailed. In this regard, Merino says that it can still be solved: “It is in the hands of the minister to solve it, but it is already late, because the 2024 resources should be collected from January of this same year.”
According to figures from the Consell, in the case of the Valencian Community, the amount of payments on account reported for 2024 amounts to 12,555 million euros, while the provisional settlement for the 2022 financial year amounts to 2,699 million euros. In total, the resources that the Valencian Community was to receive this year exceed 15,254 million euros, 1,793 million more than those settled in 2023 for both concepts.
The Generalitat Valenciana explains that both the payments on account and the liquidation forecast of the financing system are reflected annually in the General State Budget Law. “When the accounts are extended, as will happen this year with those of 2023, the Government has the possibility of approving a Royal Decree-Law that allows updating the deliveries on account to comply with the autonomies,” they recall from the Generalitat Valenciana.
For this reason, the Minister of Finance has demanded that Minister Montero and Pedro Sánchez, in the same way that they launched all the machinery to accelerate the approval of the budgets, now “demonstrate the same urgency to approve the Royal Decree-Law.” that allows the autonomous communities to have as soon as possible the resources to which the Government committed this year.”
Merino recalled that there is a very clear precedent in 2019 when, in October of that year, the Council of Ministers approved a Royal Decree-Law in which the payments on account for the autonomous communities and local entities were updated without having approved the General State Budgets for the current year. They remember that the Ministry of Finance itself, headed by María Jesús Motero, highlighted then that this measure set a “clear precedent” while at the same time representing a reinforcement of “the financial autonomy of the communities.”
Also the Minister of Innovation, Industry, Commerce and Tourism, Nuria Montes, gave her opinion this Friday on the decision of Pedro Sánchez’s Executive, calling the extension of the Budgets for the province of Alicante a marginalization. “With this decision we do not see any favorable framework to modify the financing system to put an end to the historical debt that Valencians have or the financial cost of our debt that makes us Valencians second-class citizens with respect to other autonomous communities” .
