A few days have gone by since the contemptible agreement between the Spanish government and the Spanish Federation of Municipalities and Provinces (FEMP) - the PSOE promoted the deal and Podemos facilitated it with its abstention - under which the remainders of economic surpluses generated by municipalities are to be made available to the Spanish state in the form of credit, to be paid back over ten years from 2022. Now, the revolt of some municipalities, many of them Catalan, is beginning to take shape. In addition, president Quim Torra has announced an appeal alleging the unconstitutionality of the move and has invited Catalan mayors to initiate legal action to prevent the use by the state of their economic resources.
The agreement between the government and the FEMP closes the circle of a law created under the finance ministry of the PP's Cristóbal Montoro, which prevented local councils from spending surpluses they had generated in previous years. Now, an extra step is taken and confiscation of such money is carried out when the most normal thing would be for the city councils themselves to take charge of their economic surpluses and manage them in they way they see best, since in the great majority of cases, it is money that comes from their fellow citizens via taxes.
If this attack on municipal autonomy is so abundantly clear, what is behind the attempt to loot local coffers? There is only one explanation: the urgent need to find a new source of funds that will allow the Spanish government to obtain liquidity at a particularly turbulent time. This, after the exhaustion of the Social Security Reserve Fund, better known as the pension fund, which added up to 66.8 billion euros in 2011 when Mariano Rajoy arrived at the prime minister's office, but then did nothing but shrink steadily due to several capital withdrawals during the PP's government, until it totaled only 1.5 billion euros in 2019.
The next step will be the feared tax increase on which the Spanish government has been working discreetly for some time and which will coincide with what will surely be the highest point of the economic crisis. A bankrupt country with all its vital signs in situations that are worse than worrying: crisis in the direction of the state, with the king emeritus jumping from country to country after exiling himself from Spain; territorial crisis, with Catalonia openly defending an independence referendum to leave the state; economic crisis, with the largest GDP fall in the European Union; and a judicial and liberty crisis, with the rulings of the Supreme Court being amended, answered or paralyzed in the various courts around Europe which, since 2017, have ruled in favour of the arguments made by the exiled Catalan pro-independence activists in countries as diverse as Belgium, Germany, the United Kingdom or Switzerland.