Eduardo González
The State Secretary for International Cooperation has called for grants, corresponding to 2023, to foundations and associations dependent on political parties to carry out activities foreseen in the framework of the Master Plan for Cooperation.
The resolution, signed on October 18 in Madrid by the State Secretary for International Cooperation, Pilar Cancela Rodríguez, and published three days later in the Official State Gazette (BOE), establishes that the beneficiaries of these grants will be foundations and associations dependent on political parties with parliamentary representation at the state level. Specifically, subsidies will be granted for activities of training, consolidation and dissemination of the democratic system and all its components (party system, rule of law, good governance, etc.), preferably in the countries identified in the Master Plan for Spanish Cooperation.
The total credit for the financing of these grants amounts to 800,000 euros and the amount received by each applicant may not exceed 500,000 euros. Therefore, the same amount as in 2022 is maintained for each foundation, although the total amount for the beneficiary entities is reduced by 100,000 euros. This amount is still lower than the 900,000 euros that were granted between 2012 and 2019 (except in 2016, when the then incumbent government distributed about 785,000 euros among the foundations and associations of the parties). In 2020, in the middle of the first year of the pandemic, these grants were not called.
The applications will be scored taking into account both the technical assessment of the project and the total number of seats in the Congress of Deputies and the Senate held by the political party on which the foundation depends at the time of publication of this call. The percentage value resulting from the multiplication of both factors will determine the amounts to be distributed among the beneficiary entities.
In the previous call, announced in November 2022, the Pablo Iglesias Foundation, of the PSOE, received 299,773 euros to finance its Plan of activities of the program for the promotion of democracy and the consolidation of political party systems. The second most subsidized was the Concordia y Libertad Foundation (formerly Fundación Humanismo y Democracia), of the PP, which obtained 294,917 euros for its Plan of activities of the program for the promotion of democracy and the consolidation of political party systems. In third position, and at a considerable distance, was Vox’s Disenso Foundation, which received 51,692 euros for its program Encounters, Electoral Observation and Reports for Iberosphere 2023.
The rest of the grants went to the Fundación Instituto República y Democracia, directed by Juan Carlos Monedero and linked to Podemos, which obtained 31,015 euros for the program Women in Mauritania for a sustainable blue economy; the Fundació Rafael Campalans, linked to the Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya (PSC) and presided by the former minister and former president of the Generalitat José Montilla, which received 12,934 euros for the Program of political cooperation in the Mediterranean. The challenge of the double transition (ecological and digital) in the Mediterranean; and the Sabino Arana Fundazioa, of the PNV, which received 9,667 euros for its Activities Framed in the Master Plan for Spanish Cooperation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2022-2023.
