María Jesús Montero exemplified yesterday in Congress the turning point that the meeting that a PSOE delegation and the Junts leadership held in Switzerland last Friday has represented for this abrupt start to the political course. And he did so by dedicating four hours to explaining the details of the regional financing model that the Government aspires to and that the right insists on discrediting with apocalyptic predictions.
The Minister of Finance, in fact, took the stand ready to maintain a “constructive and rigorous” debate after the commotion caused by the agreement that PSC and ERC signed in August. And although the first bars of her speech pointed to the opposite due to the list of reproaches against the PP that culminated in recriminating those of Alberto Núñez Feijóo for “playing politics in Spain against Catalonia”, the truth is that the also first vice president of the Government displayed a willful exercise of persuasion to try to attract both the Popular Party and Junts to a “high-minded” negotiation that will remove the autonomous reform from immobility.
In his two long hours of intervention, Montero dedicated explanations to all the parliamentary groups, offering them personalized arguments to advance the federalization of the State.
Montero reproached the PP for “doing politics in Spain against Catalonia”
To the PP, and to a lesser extent to Vox – whom he considered unrecoverable for the negotiation –, he guaranteed the neatness and constitutionality of the rule.
He asked Junts to put aside party calculations to embrace a pact so good for Catalonia that if they had sealed it and not Esquerra “they would be defending it in every corner.”
He promised the autonomous parties such as the BNG, Compromís or the Chunta that the new model “does not imply any bankruptcy” of interterritorial solidarity, certifying that the services they will finance for “a Galician, an Extremaduran or a Valencian will be at the same level as those of the that a Catalan will have” as long as these regions “carry out a similar fiscal effort.”
And he guaranteed ERC that the schedule will not suffer delays, starting with setting for 2026 the transfer of powers for the management of personal income tax by the Catalan treasury.
“300,000 million euros have been injected into communities and city councils during Sánchez’s mandates, and the model is failing. But it does not fail because of financing, but because of management,” Montero summarized to defend the change in model.
“3 billion euros have been injected: the model does not fail because of financing, but because of management,” said the minister.
If, as they proclaim victoriously from Junts, “it seems that the PSOE has once and for all understood that, if it wants different things to happen, it has to do different things”, yesterday the Minister of Finance seemed to put herself first on the list to break the bank to recompose the parliamentary majority that invested Pedro Sánchez.
The results remain to be seen, but it is still symptomatic that after several disastrous parliamentary weeks for the Government, yesterday it was the PSOE that made the opposition bite the dust by knocking down an amendment to the entire PP against the bill. Sustainable Mobility law and a motion with the seal of Genoa that sought to force the Government to present a structural fiscal plan. Two victories that the socialists savored smiling.
Source: www.lavanguardia.com
