The General Intervention of the State, in its latest report, exposed the Spanish Government, by accounting that while it presumed to budget for the year 2021 2,068 million euros in Catalonia, finally only executed 739.8 million, 35.7%. Meanwhile, in Madrid, what was spent far exceeded what was budgeted (184%). The feeling of ridicule is greater when, instead of detailed and reasoned explanations (if that were possible), the spokesperson minister, Elizabeth Rodriguezand the managing body of railway infrastructures, Adifhide behind supply difficulties or higher prices for raw materials during the pandemic, as true in communities with a lower degree of compliance as in those that are widely favored.
Regardless of which community appears to be the most benefited and which the most affected, the chronic mismatch between the investments approved in the parliamentary process of the General State Budgets and their execution within the foreseen time frame is an absolute sample of lack of seriousness in the administration of public resources. In any economic activity, this discrepancy between forecast spending and execution would be paralyzing and dysfunctional, if not ruinous. An unequal capacity and agility, depending on the degree of remoteness of the central administration bodies, to project, plan and execute the planned investments would be no less disappointing.
Making the Budgets (or more specifically, the territorializable investment contemplated in them) a propaganda instrument to justify parliamentary support or illustrate hypothetical moods favorable to territorial rebalancing without a verifiable correspondence with what is actually applied is one more exponent of a conception of politics as a set of perceptions, gestures and speeches built on the void. A practice that discredits politics and does not help prevent populism from being awarded electorally against the arguments based on the responsible management of public interests. In addition to creating territorial clichés that may not correspond to reality but do have pernicious effects on public debate.
Although it is difficult to unravel which investments have been left in the gutter, the high volume attributable to Adif, Renfe or the managing body of the ports does not seem to indicate that the main reason is the delays due to resistance from the territory or institutions or civil society. Catalan (obvious in cases such as the expansion of the airport, wind farms or electricity distribution networks, for example). But even if it were so, the fact that there are projects that do not circulate on a fast track from the initial proposal of the administration technicians to their execution is not systematically debatable in terms of territorial and environmental balance. In these cases, the problem is not that a society is more demanding, but that the administrations are not more capable of managing the complexity and integrating demands that today can no longer be avoided.
Given the situation of non-compliance raised, the debate should be whether solutions are already being provided to update commitments and realities and offerr guarantees that delays will not become chronic. It is just as irresponsible to build castles in the air with the budget forecasts as it is to also want to extract electoral revenues by way of denunciation without constructive alternatives, such as those that must be put on the table in an urgent manner (together with the exercise of transparency still pending) in the next bilateral infrastructure commission.