MADRID, 21 Jul. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The President of the Government and PSOE candidate for the general elections on Sunday, Pedro Sánchez, has insisted that Spain will not introduce new highway tolls in 2024, and has assured that this possibility has been withdrawn from the addendum that is being negotiated with the European Commission to receive the next packages of European funds.
Sánchez has admitted that the option of establishing tolls in 2024 was incorporated into the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan. “It is also true that in the negotiation of the addendum that we are doing with the European Commission, this possibility is already withdrawn,” he pointed out, referring to the document that the Executive will send to the Commission to receive the following disbursements of European funds.
The reason, as indicated in an interview on TVE, collected by Europa Press, is that “things have happened since 2021 -when that document was sent to the Commission- to 2023”, since Spain has overcome the pandemic and is suffering the consequences of the war in Ukraine. Thus he has indicated that reality is “dynamic” and that position has been changed.
In addition, he has stressed that the sustainable mobility bill drafted by the Government and that it will present to the Cortes Generales in the next legislature – in case of winning the elections – does not incorporate the payment of highways through tolls.
Along the same lines, and when asked again about whether more will be paid for the use of the roads in 2024, Sánchez insisted that less is currently being paid because in the last four years more than 1,000 kilometers of toll roads have been built.
Sánchez has complained about the “hypocrisy” that in his opinion “the political and media right” shows in this matter because, as he has indicated, the former president of the Government Mariano Rajoy (PP) did not raise the tolls “but prolonged them” and also Sánchez himself had to take charge of the “disaster” of the radial highways, as he has criticized, in which the ransom estimates are more than 1,000 million euros, he has pointed out.
The head of the Executive has been questioned on this issue the day after he stated that the imposition of tolls in 2024 is a hoax spread by PP and Vox.
However, this same Thursday, the European Commission corrected the Government by pointing out that the Spanish recovery and resilience plan approved by Brussels includes the commitment to adopt a law on sustainable mobility and to introduce a payment mechanism for the use of roads from 2024, although only three days before the Minister of Transport, Raquel Sánchez, “categorically” denied it.
