Pedro Sánchez imposes and the Balearics pay the price for it

Pedro Sánchez has culminated what we have been denouncing for a long time: a financing system designed to respond to the political needs of the President of the Government of Spain, not to the real needs of the autonomous communities.

The Balearic Islands voted no because there was no willingness to negotiate anything, and the unanimous and consensual demands of the entire society of the Balearic Islands were not taken into account. Sánchez simply imposed it.

Firstly, this model not only fails to improve the weight of insularity, as we have been demanding from the Balearic Islands, but it also reduces it from 0.6% to 0.5%. For Pedro Sánchez's Government, it costs less today to provide public services to islands than it did yesterday. Is that what he wants us to believe?

In the Balearic Islands, we know what insularity means. It means transporting people and goods between islands, assuming extra costs, guaranteeing connections, and maintaining infrastructure in a fragmented territory.

On the other hand, Pedro Sánchez's model does not take into account two essential realities of the Balearic Islands: the population that visits us and our demographic growth.

Millions of people arrive at our islands every year. Tourists, temporary workers, and seasonal residents use our roads, our hospitals, our public transport, and our services. But, when it comes time to distribute resources, this population disappears.

And another reality also disappears, or is not sufficiently recognized: the Balearic Islands are growing. We are one of the communities in Spain that is filling up. More inhabitants means more demand for public services. More schools, more healthcare professionals, more transport, more housing, and more infrastructure.

Pedro Sánchez cannot ask us to serve more and more people and, at the same time, give us a financing system that does not reflect this reality.

This system is designed for a single community and, therefore, what is possible for it is not possible for the Balearic Islands. The Balearic Islands contribute much more than we subsequently receive. And this is where the great contradiction of the model that Pedro Sánchez has approved appears. The problem is that the President of the Government of Spain has decided that there are communities to which a unique response can be given because he needs it politically, while he laughs at the others.

This is not equality. This is not solidarity. And this is not a fair financing system.

And there is one more reason, a red line: fiscal autonomy.

In the Balearic Islands, citizens demanded the elimination of the inheritance tax and called for a tax cut. Marga Prohens' Government listened to them and delivered.

Now Pedro Sánchez hints that he intends for the regions to have less room to decide their own fiscal policy. And we make it clear: we will not accept that Madrid imposes on us the recovery of a tax that the citizens of the Balearic Islands decided to eliminate.

The Balearic Islands do not ask for privileges. We ask for exactly the same thing that any region should be able to ask for: to be treated with justice.

But Pedro Sánchez has chosen another path. He has chosen a system that reduces insularity, ignores the population that visits us, does not respond to our growth and, furthermore, questions our capacity to decide our own fiscal policy.

That is why we voted no. Because we will not accept that the price of Pedro Sánchez's political agreements be paid, once again, by the citizens of the Balearic Islands.