The PP accuses the Government of losing a “historic opportunity” with European funds and making partisan use

The Popular Party (PP) calls the Government’s renunciation of 70% of the loans on advantageous conditions associated with the Next Generation funds. The Executive announced last week that finally will only demand 22,800 million of the 83,000 which you could opt for. “The fact that he resigned shows the management has not been as initially expected,” argued the PP’s deputy secretary of Economy and Sustainable Development, Alberto Nadal, who explains that the subsidy program has served Moncloa as an “element of flexibility” to live “without budgets.”

They consider that the decision is due to the lack of parliamentary majority to comply with the milestones required by the European Commission and not out of “prudence”. During a press conference they explained that Spain, unlike Italy, in which a system was designed that simultaneously executed transfers and loans, only transfers were requested to lost fund worth about 60,000 million. The Council of Ministers support their decision on the fact that they barely present a financial advantage over Public Treasury issues, given current financing costs.

In this sense, the main opposition party reproaches the Executive that the credits They could have been requested from 2021when interest rates were lower than current ones. “The real problem is not the cost, but the inability to generate projects and meet milestones,” they maintain, while criticizing the “partisan use” of these instruments as a “flexibility fund” to survive without budgets, not to transform the Spanish economy, nor modernize the productive fabric.

Likewise, they recalled that Brussels has cut 1.1 billion for failing to comply with three commitments regarding the temporary employment of public employees, the diesel tax and the digitalization of local and regional entities. In this regard, they criticize that so far 43% of what has been allocated has been received, making it the sixth most lagging country in the European Union, behind Hungary, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Poland and Slovenia. For this reason, they warn that the transfers must begin to be returned to Brussels from 2028 and will represent 2,000 million in additional contributions from Spain to the EU budget, with the risk of return if the required measures are not met.

From the PP they reproach that five years after the pandemic, public investment in Spain is the lowest in Europe, with private investment in real terms, that is, discounting inflation, 5.1% below that recorded in 2019, while the improvement in the weight of investment in GDP since 2019 has been 0% and productivity is 0.9% below that registered in 2018.

The Government announced last Tuesday in the Council of Ministers that after this resignation the execution of the objectives that give access to 100% of the transfers will be accelerated. This would allow investments to continue beyond August 2026, when the program expires. This involves reinforcing the capital of the Official Credit Institute (ICO) in more than 13,000 million. According to official data, to date more than 80 billion have been allocated to more than 1.3 million beneficiaries in the private sector and households. Of that amount, 58.7 billion would have already reached the real economy.