Julio García/Aquí Europa
The European Commission has insisted that Spain must submit its budget for 2025 “as soon as possible”.
October 15 marked the deadline for euro countries to submit their budget plan for the next fiscal year to Brussels. Spain already announced last week that it would exceed the deadline and delay the delivery of next year’s accounts.
“We hope that all the Member States of the Eurozone that have not yet presented their budget plans, including Spain, will do so as soon as possible and, in any case, before the budget project is presented to the national Parliament,” a community spokesman told the newspaper ElEconomista.es.
The European Commission has thus set certain red lines for Spain that it does not want to cross. It reiterates, in accordance with what it indicated last week, that October 15 is the deadline for sending next year’s accounts. And, aware of complex national dynamics that make it impossible to close agreements with other political groups, it clarifies that the budget plan must be approved by the Council of Ministers, without the need to have been supported by the Congress of Deputies.
So far, 14 of the 20 Eurozone countries have presented their accounts for next year to Brussels. These include Germany, Italy and Greece, but not Spain. The deadline is not strict, but Brussels expects governments to submit their budget plans at the latest “a few days later”, but in no case with a delay of weeks.
The budget plan is articulated as a guarantor of the fiscal roadmap that countries must present for the next four years, in line with what is required for the implementation of the reform of economic governance from 2025. In other words, the structural fiscal plan that Spain submitted to Brussels this week runs the risk of remaining an empty and inconsistent plan without the support of a budget.
A plan to control public accounts for the next four years can hardly be credible if the Spanish State does not establish a fiscal roadmap for the next year. The Commissioner for the Economy, Paolo Gentiloni, spoke along these lines after learning the news of the postponement of the accounts last week. Although the European Commission has always been flexible with deadlines, “there are limits to that flexibility” and it called for “not losing the connection between the draft budgets and the structural fiscal plans”. Its message was clear: both documents “must be connected and this implies that the level of flexibility in the deadlines is limited”.
