The government is preparing for a hot autumn and is facing difficulties in key negotiations such as the budget and the working day.

The new political year has begun for the government with the unexpected surprise of having to vote earlier than expected in Congress on whether or not to continue processing the bill to reduce working hours. But this debate, which looks rather bleak for the executive with less than a week to go, is not the only key challenge that the Moncloa will have to face in the coming months. The government has just announced that this year—unlike the last two—it will attempt to approve a General State Budget for 2026, the support of which, however, will not be easy to obtain.

This was acknowledged last Wednesday by the deputy spokesperson for Sumar in Congress and also a member of the IU party, Enrique Santiago, who admitted that his party expects to have "serious difficulties" in passing next year's financial statements . Contacts between the Ministry of Finance and the parliamentary groups have already begun informally, as the First Vice President and Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, acknowledged a few days ago, but the process is in its early stages, and, in fact, the government published the order to begin drafting the project in the Official State Gazette (BOE) last Wednesday.

To push through the General State Budget in a few months, Junts is emerging as the most difficult group to attract to achieve the majority on which the government relies, as has become customary this term. The Executive has been left without its main interlocutor with the Catalan independence movement, the arrested and imprisoned Santos Cerdán, although bridges remain open with Puigdemont's supporters. In fact, the Moncloa government has begun the political year with a gesture of rapprochement with Junts through the president of the Generalitat of Catalonia, Salvador Illa, who met with his predecessor Carles Puigdemont in Brussels on Wednesday.

For now, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez himself is not expected to do the same and travel to the Belgian capital to meet with Puigdemont, although the Moncloa government has not ruled out this possibility and has not specified a date for the meeting. In any case, whether there is a joint photo or not, the fact is that Junts is essential for the government to secure a majority that will allow it to approve its first budget since 2023. Although both the PSOE and Sumar ministers, as well as Sánchez himself, have made it clear that they do not consider it a problem to have to extend the 2023 budget for another year if the new project is rejected by Congress.

Junts' vote is not only indispensable for approving a new budget. The Catalan pro-independence movement will also be crucial next week, as their vote will determine whether the bill to reduce working hours fails or can continue to be processed in Congress. And the truth is that the government, at least for now, has the upper hand in this debate, given that negotiations with Puigdemont and his supporters—which are being led by Second Vice President Yolanda Díaz—have been stalled for months, and Junts continues to reject the text, in line with the Catalan employers' associations.

In addition to these two issues, the Executive faces the challenge of passing more than 30 pieces of legislation currently being processed in Congress. These include a reform to guarantee the universality of the National Health System and expand healthcare rights, another to "strengthen protection" for mortgage borrowers, and the final approval of the long-delayed Family Law, pending since the last legislative session.

However, perhaps the most significant of the projects currently stalled in the Lower House is the reform of the Citizen Security Law, better known as the "gag law," which has not made any progress for months despite the fact that almost a year ago, EH Bildu and the government agreed to revive a text very similar to the one that, during the last term, was shot down by the Basque Nationalist Party (Abertzale) and ERC (Republican Revolutionary Army). The draft includes compromises on both sides: the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party) pledged to "gradually" remove rubber bullets from the list of riot control equipment used by the security forces, despite this being one of its strict guidelines during the last term. Bildu and ERC accepted a much less ambitious version regarding "hot returns" than the one the Socialists offered them a year and a half ago.

Since the announcement of this agreement and, weeks later, the consideration of the bill by Congress, little has changed. The problem, this time, is not so much Junts as the struggles between some of the nationalist parties for hegemony in that political space in their respective regions. Podemos, for its part, has also been critical of the reform, which it considers lukewarm on issues such as rubber bullets and hot returns.