The People's Party (PP) negotiates the spending ceiling "with discretion"

PalmThe spokesperson for the Popular Party (PP) parliamentary group, Sebastià Sagreras, said this Monday that he is confident the government will be able to approve the spending ceiling in Parliament. At a press conference in Parliament, he explained that they are approaching the budget negotiations with "discretion." Sagreras noted that this spending ceiling of €6,924.4 million is €361.6 million more than last year. The government will meet with various groups in the coming days.

"If they block it, they will have to explain themselves to the public so that they can assume more social investment," he warned. Despite having received criticism from other spokespersons regarding the "arrogance" of First Vice President and Minister of Economy and Finance, Antoni Costa, Sagreras attributed "the vehemence with which they express themselves" to "a way of starting negotiations." "We are clear that we govern in a minority and we are making even greater efforts to negotiate the initiatives that are being put forward," he noted. The Popular Party member insisted, referring to Vox, that they are willing to introduce the vehicular use of Spanish in the Education Law, with an alternative text to the far-right text that the PP rejected a few weeks ago, considering it went beyond what was agreed upon. The Popular Party is even willing to register its own proposal in this regard, should the talks with Vox not bear fruit.

Vox spokesperson Manuela Cañadas accused the government of disrespecting the entire opposition by approving the spending cap last Friday, making it clear that they would not negotiate with the other parties on anything that did not strictly correspond to this text. "How can you negotiate something so important and present it with such arrogance?" she asked.

The PSIB: "The PP is starting with a bad strategy."

PSIB spokesperson Marc Pons considered that it will be difficult to reach an agreement on the spending ceiling. "The PP is starting with a poor strategy," he said, and asserted that it has made "no gesture or effort" to reach out to the other parties. "While the vice president boasts about the highest budgets of all," he said, he has called "a strike in social services, a clear deterioration of the health service, with longer waiting lists, and a cancer screening system that doesn't work well." Similarly, he recalled that "the latest budgets were also the highest and had some of the lowest levels of implementation we have ever seen, while part of the European funds have had to be returned to Europe because they have not been spent," he explained.