Congress has only received 14 of the 59 laws the government promised to approve in 2025

Barely three weeks before the end of the year, the Congress of Deputies received only fourteen of the 59 laws promised by the government in the Annual Regulatory Plan for 2025. At the beginning of the month, only twenty-three percent of the projects of the PSOE and the Sumar Executive are in the Lower House and of the 140 decrees that the Council of Ministers planned to sanction this year, only twenty-seven have seen the light of day.

The statistics confirm the parliamentary fragility of Sánchez, who, as if that were not enough, found himself without the support of Junts, who voted in favor of his inauguration two years ago in exchange for the approval of the amnesty law that the PSOE, before the 2023 general elections, considered “clearly unconstitutional”. This transfer, given what has been seen, did not generate the effects desired by the socialists, with the separatists withdrawing their support because the president did not even manage to bring Carles Puigdemont back to Spain without assuming criminal responsibilities, nor to ensure that Catalan is official in the European Union nor that Catalonia obtains powers in matters of immigration.

Sánchez attempted to reorient his relations with the separatists at the beginning of last week, when he recognized his “non-compliance” and announced that the Council of Ministers would approve, by royal decree-law, some of the unpaid debts with the fugitive from Waterloo (Belgium). Junts’ spokesperson in Congress, Míriam Nogueras, closed the door to reconciliation, making it impossible to improve the figures of the Executive, at least with regard to the laws, whose advancement depends on the secessionist formation.

Precisely, on Thursday, the Congress will discuss for the second time the path to stability, a preliminary step to the budgets, doomed to failure because of the unexpected Junts. During the first debate on the deficit targets, the Lower House had already predicted that there would be no state accounts in 2026 either, so that the Government will accumulate three consecutive years without being able to approve the law which should give content to the direction of its policy. This adds to executive neglect reflected in low levels of compliance with its own annual regulatory plan.

It is true that Sánchez’s Cabinet has approved the Annual Regulatory Plan for five consecutive years, since 2020, but the degree of subsequent compliance is far from the objectives set. On November 3, this newspaper published that the government had not even started to draft half of the laws planned for 2025, which already made the possibility of improving the poor results of the previous year considerably remote. The Popular Parliamentary Group of the Congress, diligent in putting pressure on the Executive for what little is being done this legislature, recorded 46 parliamentary questions on the real possibilities of approving in 2025 the various bills and royal decrees included in this year’s forecasts.

As of early last month, thirty of the 59 compromised laws had not even begun processing and the same thing happened to 61 of the 140 decrees. The bills are still in exactly the same situation, while seven decrees have started to operate, so that only 54 out of 140 (38%) still do not have a single comma written. At this point, it can be said with almost complete certainty that the government will worsen its record for the year 2024, in which only a third of the laws and less than half of the planned decrees have been approved. In 2025, the figure promises to be much lower and, as ABC published in August, 42 percent of scheduled bills are recycled from the previous year and 37 percent of executive orders were also included in the previous plan and come from non-compliances.

In the government’s responses to the PP, to which this newspaper had access, the Executive and the various ministries questioned about the pending regulations limit themselves in the vast majority of cases to giving excuses to justify that there is not even a draft of half of the laws that it planned to approve in 2025. “Political, economic or social circumstances may change, so that the planned programming is always subject to the possibility of approving initiatives not initially foreseen in the plan (…) or that certain regulations included are not submitted to the Council. of ministers because the circumstances require giving priority to the treatment of other provisions”, they affirm from Moncloa.

Just two confessions

Of the 46 issues that the PP has transferred to the various ministries responsible for the promised standards, only the Ministries of Interior and Culture assume that they will not be able to achieve their goals beyond the generic explanation that they all use “copy and paste”. “It is foreseeable that its approval cannot take place during this financial year 2025,” they admit from the department of Fernando Grande-Marlaska. From that of Ernest Urtasun, they recognize that “it is difficult to guarantee its completion before the end of the current year”. Culture has planned two decrees for this year, one to regulate the liquidation commission of the protectorate of foundations and the other to prepare a regulation on museums, but neither of them will arrive in time.

The only ministry that has given a positive response to the popular offensive is that of Agriculture, which of the five decrees requested by the PP guarantees that two will be finalized before the end of this year. Concretely, the one who sets the regulatory bases for subsidies for the agri-food and forestry sector, and the one who sets the rules for commercial names, which awaits the opinion of the Council of State. Two exceptions in an ocean of vague explanations for the opposition.