The reactivation of the debate on the regional financing model has caught Andalusia with its homework well done. The regional Parliament agreed in 2018 on a common position, endorsed by all the parties that were then represented in the Chamber, except one, Ciudadanos, which is no longer in the assembly. PP and PSOE, therefore, have, a priori, a document signed by both parties to defend a joint position.

But what should be an advantage for Andalusia can become a threat to the interests of Pedro Sánchez in the negotiation of his investiture. Because the political fronts have changed and the one who then led that demand, María Jesús Montero, is today the (acting) minister with the task of putting together a proposal that allows the PSOE to win the support of Catalan separatism even at the risk of setting fire to the relationships with other communities.

Montero will have to juggle this negotiation if he wants to serve the interests of Sánchez well.. But, on the other hand, if Andalusia is harmed again by this new distribution, the doors could be definitively closing to a return to regional politics to replace Juan Espadas.

At the time that agreement was negotiated, the Board was chaired by Susana Díaz and the Government, by Mariano Rajoy. Today the PSOE is in the central Executive (acting) and the PP presides over the autonomous government with an absolute majority. In the five years that have elapsed since that parliamentary pact, the status quo has taken a radical turn pending what happens with the investiture of Pedro Sánchez.

The agreement that Montero championed in Andalusia and to which the PP of Juanma Moreno joined claimed up to 4,000 million euros more per year for the autonomous community. The negotiated text was based on the fact that to cover the costs of the fundamental public services system in Spain as a whole, an extra injection of some 16,000 million euros more per year was required, a figure that was calculated taking into account what the cost of these services in the years 2014 and 2015.

In order to achieve financial sufficiency, it was proposed to maintain the assignment of 50 percent of personal income tax and raise the percentages of assignment of VAT and that of Special Taxes to 70 percent.. The possibility of what the document calls a “vertical transfer” of resources or, what amounts to the same thing, an increase in the participation of communities in State revenues, was also left open, in the conviction that, in Currently, the State has a disproportionate slice of the pie based on the volume of its powers.

In order to distribute the funds among the autonomous communities, the agreement proposed a revision of the concept of “adjusted population”, so that it would come as close as possible to the real, “by law” population of the communities. The “adjusted population” is the result of applying a series of corrective parameters to the “entitled” population so as to take into account the particular circumstances of each community that may affect the final cost of services, such as insularity, in the case of the Balearic and Canary Islands, or the age of the population. In fact, the Government of Juanma Moreno advanced from its position in the same direction as the Community of Madrid, eliminating the Inheritance tax by way of bonuses and reducing the Heritage tax to a minimum.

In any case, that Parliament agreement gave the PP additional legitimacy when it came to demanding a change in the law that regulates the financing of the autonomous communities, since when it signed the pact with Susana Díaz it did so despite that this meant increasing the pressure on the government of Mariano Rajoy.

Later, with Sánchez in Moncloa, the PP highlighted the contradictions of Minister Montero, unable to defend in the Council of Ministers the agreement that she had promoted in the Andalusian Parliament. In the same way, the Government of Juanma Moreno had no political reservations to seek alliances with other communities then governed by the PSOE, such as the Valencian one, to claim a joint position of force against the immobility of the central Executive. And this despite the fact that the debate generates a strong conflict of interest for the leadership of the PP because not all the communities governed by the popular supporters defend the same negotiation model.