Cañadas accuses Costa of "telling lies" to slow down the budget negotiation: "We hadn't even asked for anything regarding language"

PalmaThe first vice-president and minister of Economy and Finance, Antoni Costa, has postponed negotiations with Vox regarding the budget until after the general elections. The reason is that he has detected "signs" that the far-right wants to use them for electoral purposes. In a press conference at Parliament, the spokesperson for the Vox parliamentary group, Manuela Cañadas, accused him of "telling lies." "I don't know what he was referring to, and he doesn't even know himself," she retorted, and insisted on her party's good faith to approve the accounts. "We hadn't even said anything about language, because we understood that the PP would say no, so that it wouldn't be an obstacle," she said as proof of this.

"The performance of parties like the PP and the PSOE leaves me stunned," she continued. After Costa accused Vox of not having maintained the discretion he had requested during the negotiations, Cañadas defended that "there has been no leak" and that she felt "offended" by the first vice-president's statements. In this sense, she said that "the political use of making it look like Vox does not want to approve a budget", in any case, "is done by the PP": "The one playing games is Costa".

The deputy spokesperson for the Popular parliamentary group, Marga Duran, insisted that "negotiations need time, willingness, and confidentiality". "The negotiations are being clouded by political electoral interests", she explained: "To remove them, the best thing was to postpone the negotiations, leave it at a standstill, and start later on". In practice, this move will leave the Executive with little room for maneuver, since it will have to try to close an agreement with the 2026 budget extended, between December and May 2027.