“The Government has already approved in the Governing Council the necessary measures to implement free public transport for the whole year and we continue to work along these lines,” he said.
However, the minister criticises the situation “the result of improvised and last-minute measures by the central government. We made this clear on 24 December, the day that free travel was announced just a week before the start of the year”, he recalls.
According to Mateo, the Partido Popular parliamentary group will soon present a new initiative to “consolidate free public transport in the Balearic and Canary Islands and increase and improve aid throughout the country. From now on what we are asking is that the Spanish Government fulfils its commitment. We find ourselves with an unstable government that has no guarantees to approve an essential issue of key importance for the Balearics, such as public transport. If in 2023 the state funding was already insufficient, in 2024 the central government contributed 14.6 million euros and the government contributed 54 million euros.”
Regarding the possibility that the state money may not arrive, the minister trusts that the government will fulfil the commitment announced on 24 December by the central government to increase funding. “It also gives us security to know that the popular group, as well as other parliamentary groups, will present a justice initiative to guarantee free education throughout the year,” he concluded.
It remains to be seen whether Palma City Council will also maintain the free service on the buses of the Municipal Transport Company (EMT). The problem is that Spain’s minority leftist government suffered a new setback in the lower house of parliament on Wednesday, when lawmakers rejected several decrees, including an extension of a windfall tax for energy companies and transport subsidies.
The administration of Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez faces a balancing act in every vote as it weighs concessions to parties from across the spectrum with opposing demands, such as hard-left Podemos and centre-right Catalan separatists Junts. The arithmetic was further complicated last week when Junts leader Carles Puigdemont said his party would not support the government unless a “trust crisis” between them was resolved.
The rejected decrees included an extension of a temporary windfall tax on energy companies, a pension raise and a six-month extension of temporary subsidies for public transport. The windfall tax had been expected to fail after lawmakers first voted last month to eliminate the levy, opposed by both Junts and the Basque nationalist party PNV. The parties argue that the tax impacted investments in their respective regions.
The government still had to take it to parliament as a precondition for Podemos to negotiate other legislation, including the budget bill for this year, which is yet to be presented. In the meantime, Spain is rolling over its spending plan from 2023, as it did last year. The temporary tax of 1.2% for companies with a turnover of at least 1 billion euros was introduced in 2022 to ease cost-of-living pressures for ordinary Spaniards as firms gained from a surge in energy prices following the war
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