Isabel Díaz Ayuso, president of the Community of Madrid, rebelled against the accounts that the Government took to Congress last October. “We have gone from the motto of the independence supporters, from ‘Spain steals from us’, to really steal from Madrid”, she denounced in reference to Catalonia, a priori one of the big winners of the Budgets. However, since Pedro Sánchez came to power in 2018, Madrid has been the region where the most public investment has been executed, far ahead of socialist communities. At least according to the statistics of the Ministry of Finance compiled from the report on the Territorial distribution of state public sector investment. In fact, since Sánchez landed in La Moncloa, the Government has only executed 100% (or more) of its investments in two communities: Madrid and Murcia, both governed by the PP. According to data compiled by EL PAÍS from the reports prepared by the General Intervention of the State Administration (IGAE) in the last four years, this degree of deployment is well above the average for Spain, 72%, or for other communities with a high population such as Andalusia and even those governed by its priority government partners, such as Catalonia or the Basque Country.
It is paradoxical that the community governed by Díaz Ayuso is the most benefited by the socialist Executive, according to the accounting of the Treasury, because in recent years no major infrastructure works have been remembered. There are several explanations for this situation, the way of accounting for investments in other parts of the State that end up imputed to Madrid or the investment dynamics of large public companies, such as Renfe, Adif, or Aena, among others. The Government, which calls not to make comparisons between communities, warns of investments extra that he had to carry out in 2021 by the radio stations and Filomena and the capital effect from Madrid.
Budgets are the key law of the legislature. Proof of this is that the impossibility of carrying out the 2019 accounts precipitated the elections. And in the chapter on regional investments is a good part of the heart of the negotiation with other political forces, especially the nationalists. With the budgets come the promises, but with the publication of their execution, the rendering of accounts. And the complaints. During the Rajoy administrations, the communities for which the largest endowments were foreseen were Andalucía (16.2% of the total), Madrid (11.8%) and Castilla y León (11.6%), while under the executives of Sánchez were Andalusia (15.8%), Catalonia (14.9%) and Madrid (11%). In the latest accounts, investment in Madrid fell by 7.9%, while that destined for Catalonia rose by 11.5%. Sánchez depended on the support of ERC to carry out the project and Ayuso shouted to the heavens and decided to sing “Spain steals from us” while the Government remained silent.
However, one thing is what is budgeted and another thing is the hard cash that ends up being allocated to each region. Last Monday the execution of 2021 was announced. And the tables turned: Catalonia considered it, in the words of the councilor Jaume Giró, “humiliating”, while Madrid, clearly benefited, said nothing. The degree of execution last year was atypical, 184% in Madrid and only 36% in Catalonia. For this reason, EL PAÍS has calculated what the execution has been in the last four years. The General State Budgets between 2018 and 2022 had allocated 4,901 million euros to the Community of Madrid, but the region governed by Díaz Ayuso has ended up receiving 5,547 million. In other words, they ended up investing 113% of what was committed. In contrast, in that period in Catalonia the average execution was 53% between 2018 and 2021, which received 3,266 million.
The Secretary of Territory and Mobility of the Generalitat, Isidre Gavín, disfigured this data to the Minister of Transport, Raquel Sánchez, on Tuesday. She this she replied that “you cannot make a story based only on figures” and defended that, since 2018, “the Government has invested and executed in Catalonia more than in any other autonomous community”, reports Marc Rovira. Sánchez argued that “never before have so many works been carried out in Catalonia as now” and he believed that it is necessary to “avoid comparisons between autonomous communities”.
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Radials and Filomena
Government sources qualified last year’s data. To begin with, they highlighted the anomaly in Madrid, where 191.2 million euros had to be allocated to the rescue of the radial motorways M-21, R-3 and R-5 and AP-41 and 21.8 million to face the storm Filomena in January 2021. That already represents 20% of the 952 million that the community received and that were not budgeted. It is also necessary to take into account all the expenses that the region receives for being capital. That is clear, for example, in the chapter on ministerial investment. There appear, among others, 157 million that did not appear in the accounts of the Ministry of Economy and that are written down in full to the Community of Madrid; 110 million for Justice (compared to the 12.2 million initially planned), and 43 million for Defense.
Budget execution is one of the most analyzed parameters in Catalonia, which has made underinvestment in public works one of its historical demands, supporting the need for resources equivalent to its weight in the national GDP, 19%, to be allocated in the community. . The number of investments in recent years has been growing in recent years, but not so when the year was closed and with it the execution figures emerged. The Employers Promotion of Labor indicated yesterday that, since 2013, the average does not exceed 60%. “You can have a problem in a work one year, but not that you have problems with all the works and every year,” denounces the president of the Catalan contractors and vice president of the Catalan employers’ association, Joaquim Llansó.
Minister Raquel Sánchez points out that since June 2018 her ministry has allocated 3,671 million euros to Catalonia, a figure higher than other communities such as Castilla y León (2,450 million), Galicia (1,399 million) or Madrid (2,523 million). The minister on the upturn in investment in Catalonia is also assumed by Adif, responsible for the railway infrastructure. The public company defends that last year it allocated a total of 163.3 million to Madrid, compared to 191.5 million in Catalonia. The problem for the Ministry of Transport, in any case, is that projects in this community are running late, so before starting up the machines to carry out the works, projects must be concluded and put out to tender, previous steps in which Catalonia I was late. This work would be in the process of being solved and from now on real investments could emerge, which, despite not being insured, were included in the Budgets.
Murcia, one of the communities that has become an example of public investment because what is allocated in the budget is invested, has managed to have a degree of execution of 100% because there were several mature works in previous years that “has allowed progress to be made above what was initially planned, such as the sections of the Northwest Arch or sections of the A-33″ and even conclude some sections of the Reguerón highway (MU-30) earlier than expected, defends a Transport spokeswoman.
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