The president of the Junta de Andalucía, Juan Manuel Moreno, and the Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, last April at the inauguration of the new CC OO headquarters in Seville.
The President of the Government will receive the Andalusian president at the Moncloa Palace on June 17. This first official meeting, which both governments have announced this Sunday, will take place two and a half years after Juan Manuel Moreno took office and after repeated requests from the president of the Junta de Andalucía, who will take priority issues such as the pandemic and economic reactivation. The appointment will take place four days after the Andalusian PSOE primaries, in which the militants will choose their candidate for the Junta and Moreno's next rival in the regional elections.
Before the announcement of the meeting, the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, held a telephone conversation this Friday with the new President of the Generalitat of Catalonia, Pere Aragonès - appointed on May 21 - with whom he agreed to hold a bilateral meeting in June, news that has deeply bothered the Andalusian Government, which interprets it as a comparative offense.
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The Minister of the Presidency, Public Administration and Interior and spokesman for the Andalusian Government, Elías Bendodo, criticized last Tuesday that Sánchez was going to receive Aragonès without having done so with the head of the Andalusian Executive since he took office in January 2019 "It is disrespectful that the President of the Government has not yet seen fit to receive Juan Manuel Moreno," Bendodo declared on June 1. According to the Andalusian government spokesman, Sánchez's last request for a meeting with Moreno was made more than a month ago by means of a letter that “they have not answered us”. "During this term, the president of the Board has held many more meetings with King Felipe VI than those that have occurred with the chief executive," he added.Bendodo stated then that "the problems of Andalusia are at least as important and deserve the same attention as those of Catalonia."
For her part, the Minister of Finance and Government spokesperson, María Jesús Montero, announced in Seville on June 2 that Sánchez would meet "soon" with the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, who won the elections last May 4, and with the president of the Junta de Andalucía.
For Montero, the delay in the meeting was due to the fact that the appointment of the president of the Board "was followed by several electoral processes" and, subsequently, the pandemic broke out.
According to the statement from the Board, the meeting will serve, among other issues, to "discuss the fight against the pandemic and the necessary economic and social reactivation of Andalusia, issues that have become a priority for the Andalusian Government."
Among the list of pending issues that Moreno will take to La Moncloa are the distribution of the Next Generation economic recovery funds, the compensation of the covid funds, which the Andalusian Government considers discriminatory with respect to other autonomous communities, and the autonomous financing model .
In 2020 Andalusia received 2,199 million euros from the central government's covid fund, endowed with 16,000 million, an amount that represents 13.7% of the total while the Andalusian population is 18% of the Spanish.
The difference, according to the Minister of Finance and European Finance, Juan Bravo, places Andalusia at the bottom of the Spanish communities in receiving aid to face the pandemic together with Murcia.
Those 2,199 million represent 261 euros
per capita,
compared to the 340 euros of national average.
In other words, Andalusia receives 23% less.
"The Ministry of Finance is unilaterally deciding the distribution criteria that are different from those agreed in the sector conferences for health," said Bravo in a parliamentary response to the Adelante Andalucía group on the resources provided by the Government of Spain to combat the crisis of the coronavirus published in the Official Gazette of the Parliament of Andalusia.
Regarding health funds, in which 9,000 million have been distributed, Andalusia has received 989 million, which represents 118 euros per inhabitant, compared to the Spanish average of 191 euros, again the lowest figure of all the autonomous communities, according to the Andalusian Government.
To avoid that "this offense" is repeated in 2021, the Andalusian head of the Treasury has sent to the central Government "a distribution proposal to distribute in a fair way the resources to combat the covid and so that 2,800 million euros reach Andalusia". Proposal that, so far, has not received a response.