MADRID, 18 Dic. (EUROPA PRESS) –

The 2023 General State Budget (PGE) project faces its decisive phase in the Senate next week and, foreseeably, will be definitively approved for publication in the Official State Gazette (BOE) the following days and its entry into Effective January 1. If there were any changes, they would return to Congress to be approved in plenary before the end of the year.

According to the calendar of the Upper House, the processing of the third and last public accounts of this legislature will conclude in the plenary session that will begin on Tuesday the 20th and will surely extend to Wednesday the 21st.

After the Senate Budget Committee has approved by majority the draft opinion of the General State Budget (PGE) bill of 2023 without modifications, the Plenary is preparing to debate the partial amendments that have remained alive and vote on them. public accounts.

It should be noted that a plenary session of the Senate has already rejected the five vetoes to the entirety presented by the PP, Vox, Cs, JxCAT and UPN and also rejected the 87 challenges to the sections presented by the groups.

The rejection of the vetoes was possible thanks to the simple majority held by the PSOE in the Upper House, with 113 seats out of a total of 265, and the support of other formations, which has made it possible to add in each of the five votes to the vetoes at least 148 votes against.

Thus, the majority of the parties that already supported the accounts in Congress, such as ERC (14 votes), PNV (10) or EH Bildu (2), joined the votes of the Socialists. These have also been joined by other formations such as Más Madrid, PRC, Més per Mallorca, Geroa Bai, the Agrupación Socialista Gomera, the Aragonese Party, Compromís or CC, while Teruel Existe opted to abstain from voting on the amendments to the whole.

In addition, it should be noted that ERC, Bildu and PNV decided not to present any partial amendment to the draft General State Budget (PGE) for the year 2023 in the Senate. In this way, the Government of Pedro Sánchez foreseeably has the necessary support for the final approval of the third and last accounts of the coalition government legislature.

Neither did the PSOE present partial amendments, nor did the senator of the Gomera Socialist Association, Fabián Chinea, nor the three Vox parliamentarians, as they already did in Congress, where they did not even participate in the vote. The rest of formations registered, for their part, more than 4,000 partial amendments to public accounts.

It coincides that the head of the Executive, Pedro Sánchez, and the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, will meet in a new ‘face to face’ in the Senate on the same day that the public accounts are expected to be approved, on Wednesday, December 21 .

And it is that the Government has decided to move this last control session of the year to Wednesday the 21st, although this type of plenary session with questions and interpellations to the Government is held in the Upper House on Tuesdays at 4:00 p.m.

On Wednesday, December 21, the government control session will also take place in Congress, although this plenary session will begin at 09:00 in the Lower House. Thus, that same day, just a few hours later, the Executive of Pedro Sánchez will once again submit to questions and interpellations from the parliamentary groups, in this case in the Senate.

What’s more, Sánchez will have to answer a question that day from the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, in addition to two other questions from the democratic group, which includes Ciudadanos, Teruel Existe and the PRC, and from the mixed group, in which there is Vox, PAR and UPN.