In any government, the figure of the Minister of Finance inspired an almost reverential fear among the rest of the members of the Council of Ministers, since each department depends on whether or not the person in charge of finances opens the tap of money to carry out their projects. However, the current holder of the portfolio, María Jesús Montero, who since this summer is also the brand new number two of the PSOE –after resigning Adriana Lastra as deputy general secretary–, does not have the same 'auctoritas' over the territorial barons of her party , as has been revealed this week with the tax proposals that some, including the president of the Valencian Community, Ximo Puig, have made at their own risk, without entrusting themselves to the central Executive and looking, of course, at their own and imminent electoral calendar. In what the former President of the Government and former Secretary General of the Socialists, Felipe González, equipped last Friday at the La Toja Forum with "Pancho Villa's army" - each one, he said, "shooting for his side" - , the autonomous presidents of the PSOE and the leaders of each of the party's federations begin to undermine the authority of Pedro Sánchez's number two, precisely in the week in which he presented his own fiscal plan, agreed with his coalition partner, United We can, to establish a "solidarity tax" on wealth above three million euros and a reduction on income below 21.000 euros per year, but without any relief measure for the middle classes above that salary threshold. Related News standard Yes The Government's tax reduction ignored to 80% of wage earners and 90% of pensioners Bruno Pérez Some 15 million labor income tax collectors and around eight million pensioners are left out of the selective reduction of IRPF Several socialist leaders consulted agree on this diagnosis, which one of them summarizes with a graphic phrase: "It will not be able to stop the barons." A regional president stated that "this looks like an auction", while a member of the Federal Executive lamented that "it gives the feeling that we are constantly improvising". From other regional executives they estimate that Montero has "dragged his feet" taking too long to launch his fiscal plan. A torpedoed announcement It was last Monday, in the press room of the PSOE headquarters, on Calle Ferraz in Madrid, when Montero appeared to give what was supposed to be the starting gun for a week focused on the presentation of that fiscal plan The project that is the cornerstone of Sánchez's propaganda strategy to present himself as a president who governs for "the majority" and who would be besieged by dark "powers" with their corresponding "media terminals." A rhetoric that both the tenant of La Moncloa and the main socialists in the Government have invariably repeated for months now, placing the leader of the opposition, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, at the center of that discursive equation, since he would be the president of the Popular Party (PP ) ) something like the political 'figurehead' of these interest groups. However, the alleged management of time coordinated between Moncloa and Ferraz, in the figure of Montero herself, who occupies high responsibilities in the two headquarters of socialist power, was torpedoed barely twenty-four hours later by one of the main institutional positions of the party, the president of the Valencian Community, Ximo Puig. In the solemn context of the plenary session of the Valencian Parliament, it launched a fiscal plan for reductions in personal income tax for income of less than 60.000 euros per year, very much in line with some plans and proposals of the PP, which does not insist on the deflation of the rate of the Rent, and what is more important, without attending to the requirements at the highest level that the Government sent to him to stop that plan. Neither Sánchez nor the Minister of Finance could sustain in the Generalitat Valenciana, which torpedoed the Government's fiscal plan. It was Sánchez himself, convalescing after his positive for covid, who picked up the phone to try to persuade him. But his intent was as in vain as those of the minister had previously been with his regional counterpart, the Valencian Minister of Finance, Arcadi Spain, a member, to make matters worse, of the Federal Executive of the PSOE, to whose leadership Montero has risen this summer. Another example of the impaired internal authority of the deputy secretary general. Despite everything, sources from the Generalitat show their disbelief at the attitude of the socialist leadership and, although "lack of communication", they assure that Puig's plan consists of "progressivity in a system that did not have it" and that, for Therefore, it can be defended “from a progressive perspective”. Nobody escaped the influence at this juncture of the electoral horizon, with municipal and regional elections and close to my May. An urgency for the imminence of the appointment with the polls that is even greater in the case of Puig, who has not yet cleared up the question of when the elections will be held in his community, but which could well be the first to take place. He himself came forward in 2019, when they were held in April, the same day as the general elections (later they would repeat in November) and before the other autonomies and cities. The rest of the barons, especially those who will defend governments, in the case of Emiliano García-Page (Castilla-La Mancha), Javier Lambán (Aragón), Guillermo Fernández Vara (Extremadura), Adrián Barbón (Asturias), Francina Armengol (Baleares), Ángel Víctor Torres (Canarias) and Concha Andreu (La Rioja) are also not up to the task, if necessary, of strictly submitting to the directives of the party in Madrid. Or put another way, and it is made clear by party leaders in the different autonomous communities: first the territory and its electoral defense, then the common strategy. And in this both those who have been sanchistas from the first hour and those who have never hidden their differences with the party leader agree. One and the other share, word up or down, the diagnosis that if the results of 2019, when the PSOE resisted in its main feuds and consolidated the Government of Spain, was a "merit" of Sánchez and his figure then, recently arrived to power, now it's up to the regional presidents to assert their profile and their own accent, taking into account the uniqueness of each of their electoral grounds. And in this thought are not only those who govern, but also those who aspire to do so in the most difficult places. The sample button of the new leader of the PSOE in Madrid, Juan Lobato, who presented there with a tax reduction plan and who this week, in line with events, has once again defended reductions for taxpayers who enter up to 100.000 euros, is enough annuals. “The socioeconomic reality of the Community of Madrid is what it is. We are serious people and we have studied this reform according to the needs and circumstances that exist in Madrid”, settled the leader of the Madrid Socialists. Related News standard No The PSOE intends to record assets of more than 1,5 million euros in Madrid This measure, proposed by the leader of the socialists in the region, Juan Lobato, would also affect inheritances of more than one million euros All This political tidal wave, to which Fernández Vara also joined this week with fiscal relief for its citizens in the form of a historic drop in public rates, entails a certain political paradox. Normally it is when a party is in opposition to the central government that its autonomous leaders go more freely and there is the possibility of arguing with their leader. See, without going any further, the crisis that ended this year with Pablo Casado.
