Colombia’s Congress failed to vote on the government’s 2025 budget and won’t reconvene until after the September 15 deadline imposed by the law.
House Representative Jose Eliecer Salazar, who presides the budget debates, convened an extra session on Monday in another attempt to seek majority approval for next year’s government spending plan.
“This has never happened before,” William Reyes of the Javeriana University’s Fiscal Observatory told newspaper El Espectador.
This has never happened before and the organic budget statute does not establish any rules on what happens in case the amount is denied.
Fiscal expert William Reyes
The failure to vote was due to a dispute between the government coalition and the opposition about a $2.8 billion (COP12 trillion) deficit in the budget.
Finance Minister Ricardo Bonilla plans to fill this hole with the increased revenue expected to be raised through a tax reform that is expected to be debated later this year.
The opposition refuses to approve the government’s proposed spending bill, which would implicitly tie the lawmakers to the proposed tax reform.
In an attempt to pressure the government, opposition lawmakers abandoned the debate, which impeded a vote on any of the seven budget proposals.
President Gustavo Petro has said that he would approve his finance minister’s budget proposal by decree if Congress fails to approve any of the seven proposals defining the size of the budget.
Whether the Constitutional Court will approve such an extraordinary decree is uncertain, however.
