It will soon be a year since the plenary session of the Congress of Deputies approved the royal decree law of the Government for the management of European funds. The partners of the Government lent their votes for the approval of the royal decree law in exchange for one condition: that it be later processed as a bill in order to open the opportunity for the introduction of amendments. Thus, the entire House voted on January 28, 2021 in favor of processing the Royal Decree as a bill. But the political groups that are part of the Government – PSOE and United We Can – have been blocking its processing for a year with the ploy of extending the deadline for submitting amendments over and over again.
The representatives in the Table of the Congress of PSOE and United We Can have made use of their majority to chain, for the moment, up to 38 extensions of the deadline for submitting partial amendments (the current one expires on february 2). And all this to the despair of the rest of the political groups that are waiting for an opportunity to defend changes in the articles that, from their respective points of view, should serve to improve the management of European funds that, up to now, suffers from a certain delay in the call for aid and investment. From the socialist group they limit themselves to pointing out that, at this moment, they have other “priorities”, reports Juanma Romero.
regional competences
Above all, nationalist or pro-independence groups that support the government await their turn -such as GNP Y CKD-, waiting to amend the law in the direction of providing more powers to the autonomous communities in the management of European funds. The Popular Group is also waiting for its turn to take the debate on its main proposal to the plenary session of Congress: the creation of an authority independent of the Government to lead the management of the funds. “It makes no sense that a bill that, by agreement of Parliament, was processed by the urgent route, has spent more than a year pending the deadline for the processing of amendments,” concludes the economic spokesperson for the PP, elvira rodriguez.
The criticism of the PP coincides with the offensive that, with the president of Madrid, Isabel Diaz Ayuso at the head, is launching the party before public opinion and the courts against the criteria that the Government is following for the distribution of European funds among the autonomies. Ayuso has already announced an appeal before the Supreme Court requesting that the distribution of 9 million euros that “arbitrarily” has been distributed among four communities for employment subsidies be annulled. After that, the leader of the PP, Pablo Casado, has defended that there are communities governed by his party such as Madrid and Galicia and dozens of municipalities that mobilize and even resort to the courts the “discretion” and the “hand-sharing” of European funds because, in his opinion, what is happening “is a scandal” and that the government’s actions “can lead to corruption”. “The thief believes that everyone is of his condition”, is the response with which the spokeswoman, Isabel Rodríguez, has intervened in the controversy, pulling proverb.
slow execution
The delay in the processing of the bill does not, logically, prevent the measures of the royal decree-law from being applied from the day after its publication in the Official State Gazette, on December 31, 2020. In it, deadlines and paperwork were reduced and the ‘Perte’ strategic projects were created as a new form of public-private collaboration to combine investment from administrations and companies. All of this has been applied since January 1, 2021, but some political groups see in the blocking of its parliamentary processing as a bill the fear of the Government to ‘open the melon’ of transferring greater powers to the autonomies in the management of the funds. Also from a business point of view, it is pointed out that a greater regional capacity in the final profiling of the calls for subsidies and investments would help the effect of the funds to reach the private sector earlier and more fully.
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“Clearly, it is a delaying maneuver that would border on filibustering. Not only with this law, there are many more,” complains the ERC deputy Joan Capdevila. He is convinced that the delay that the PSOE-Unidad Podemos coalition is promoting has to do with a “will to recentralize”, contrary to the “principle of subsidiarity”, which -from his point of view- results in less efficiency when it comes to manage European funds. “That will prevent the money from European funds from reaching the self-employed and SMEs,” he predicts.
According to the PNV deputy Idoia Sagastizabal, the decree in force “was to eliminate bottlenecks for the management of European funds, simplify the administrative, bureaucratic and regulatory burden that would allow rapid execution of aid and projects charged to the funds, and what we have seen to date now it’s a slow run which is partly due to these issues.” The Basque deputy complains that “not only this decree, but many others that are blocked in the Table, stealing the right of groups to improve or amend what is foreseen in them” and adds that “a slow execution can hinder growth economic since it is based on European funds”.
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