The Cortes of Castilla y León have forced the regional president, Alfonso Fernández Mañueco (PP), to face 2026 without budgets for next year. It is the fifth time he has expanded the accounts since he has been on the Board of Directors, since 2019, the sixth if we consider the months of 2024 in which the community managed the numbers of the previous year. Mañueco has assured that starting from March there will be the Budget, which will require him to continue to govern either alone, in the face of an absolute majority that the polls say is unlikely, or with pacts with the same parties that voted against his economic project on Thursday. The electoral race is already a few weeks away from March, the date of the foreseeable elections, and PSOE and Vox are uniting their movements, as well as the minority forces, to show the loneliness of Mañueco, whose negotiations to seek consensus, also not too active according to those mentioned, have failed.
This Thursday’s plenary session corroborated what the opposition has underlined in recent weeks: that despite dealing with “expansionary” budgets and historic highs in the territory, the PP has no partner since the far right has given up in the summer of 2024. The leader accused his opponents, this Thursday’s parliamentarians and the spring elections, of harming, in his opinion, the citizens who would benefit from those financial plans that he and his advisors have proclaimed for weeks the provinces despite knowing which would hardly have been anything but air. “These budgets will be approved, if not now, in March,” exclaimed Mañueco, appealing to “a new majority” for which he will need the victory of the absolute majority of the PP that he did not obtain in 2019 or 2022, chaining himself to Ciudadanos and Vox respectively, or to new alliances. These potential partners point to the ultras, who after last year’s divorce repeatedly squeezed the PP in budgetary issues, but raised it by preventing with their votes the success of a commission of inquiry into the fatal summer fires. This “lock” between PSOE and Vox was denounced again by the PP, as in recent months. David Hierro, spokesman for the far right, warned his former ally: “Your fate is increasingly dark.”
The session took place with the presence in the chamber of the socialist candidate, as Carlos Martínez has no precedent as a regional prosecutor and is attending the debate as mayor of Soria and candidate of the PSOE to return to the leadership of Castilla y León, throne reserved for the PP since 1987. This party, according to internal sources, manages polls that would even allow a victory over the PP, which with Mañueco obtained the two worst results in its history, even if on that occasion it would hardly have had the numbers to reach the territorial command. The Socialist spokesperson, Patricia Gómez Urbán, highlighted the president’s lack of support and appealed to him to call the polls as soon as possible: “It is only, in the minority, when the budgets are returned he should dissolve the Cortes and call early elections.” The last possible day of the mandate to hold elections would be March 15, a date that the PP is holding onto internally to avoid the harsh winter in Castilla y León and for greater participation to relaunch them; In 2022, the February 13 vote was held and Vox emerged, once again strong in the polls against a faltering PP. Everything if there are no movements in Madrid, where Mañueco admits that if there are national polls he will get on that electoral train, or in other regions where the lack of alliances causes the ranking to change, such as in Aragon.
This possibility would depend on the strength and interests of localist parties, such as the strengthened Leoneanism of the Leonese Popular Union, a Soria Ya! indirectly damaged by sharing a geographical origin with Martínez and his possible influence on the voter of Soria, or Por Ávila, a division of Ávila of the PP who has been in office for two terms with a seat in the Cortes. All of them, together with Unidas Podemos, which is unlikely to repeat the pact between Izquierda Unida and Podemos due to disagreements between the blocs, criticized Mañueco’s way of doing things and his lack of willingness to negotiate. Many alluded to a “call” that never came and Pablo Fernández, of Podemos, praised Mañueco for his ability to bring such a disparate Assembly to agree.
