Next Sunday Alberto Núñez Feijóo will bring together regional presidents and heads of the opposition where the PP does not govern in Zaragoza to present his main proposals regarding regional financing in the case of governing. One of the things that most differentiates it from the model planned by the Government is that of protecting by law the fiscal autonomy of the autonomies, that is, that they have the freedom to lower their taxes or not. Although this measure is not new in the popular ideology, it acquires total relevance after the warning of the vice president and Minister of Finance Mª Jesús Montero to “punish” autonomous communities that lower tax rates with less state funds and with the proposal that the collection of transferred taxes (Heritage) or own taxes go to the common basket. The PP indicates that it rejects “the criticism of a Government that boasts of defending diversity while delivering one of the greatest attacks on the State of the autonomies in 46 years of democracy.”
The second great promise that Feijóo will make to his barons will be to increase the State resources that will go to the autonomies. As has been done in the latest reforms of the financing system and in the announced Government project, the percentages of participation in State taxes (IRPF, VAT and Special Taxes) will be increased.
Likewise, Funds will be created to meet the financing needs of public services. The PP highlights that the most expensive of all of them is health, which takes on average 40% of the regional budgets and to which “special attention” will be devoted. The establishment of specific funds to cover this financing is one of the solutions.
Núñez Feijóo will launch another proposal that is also defended by autonomous communities that are not governed by the PP such as Castilla-La Mancha: the creation of a transitional fund with State money while the regional financing system is negotiated, processed and implemented. This process is very long considering that, in addition, The Organic Law of Financing of the Autonomous Communities (LOFCA) must be modified, which requires an absolute majority in Congress to be approved.
What is also beyond all doubt is that “the Tax Agency is not going to be cut up” nor, of course, will the principle of ordinality be negotiated, by which more funds are given to the autonomies that contribute the most to the system via tax collection or via funds such as the one previously known as solidarity.
The experience of executing European funds Next Generation has served the PP to introduce co-governance of resources arriving from the European Union into its financing system. Thus, the Government must share with the autonomous communities the effective application and technical criteria for the distribution of these funds. There will no longer be time for the Next Generation (they will stop being received this year), but Núñez Feijóo intends that information about any European resource be shared with the autonomies. They have blamed the central government for the fact that, although there is a declaration of intention to share criteria, in practice it has not been carried out and the regional governments have been left out in the destiny and execution of the Next Generation.
Joint negotiation but with self-defense of interests
A key issue for the main opposition party is that there cannot be bilateral negotiations when it comes to regional financing. Multilateralism will be the norm that governs the processing and implementation of the system they devise in Genoa. The case of negotiations with the Catalan secessionist parties or with the Generalitat itself have further reinforced the modus operandi. Feijóo will insist in Zaragoza that there is nothing more “unsupportive and arbitrary” than bilateral meetings with a single autonomous community. And the Fiscal and Financial Policy Council stands as the body defended by the PP as a guarantor that decisions will be made together.
Multilaterality does not mean that each autonomy cannot defend its interests, which do not have to coincide with those of others, they affirm in the training. In the case of regional financing, these interests materialize in the weighting of the variables. If, for example, for Madrid, Catalonia or the Valencian Community the adjusted population is essential, for others such as Castilla y León geographical dispersion is essential. Or the aging of its population and the resources that this issue consumes, as occurs in Cantabria or Asturias. The fight to benefit from the system and obtain more resources “is understandable,” they say in the PP. Each autonomous community can bet on what is best for it in the negotiation “as long as it does not attack the whole” as, in its opinion, is happening with the negotiations with ERC. In fact, the Government has expressed that it will hold bilateral meetings with all of them.
