Parliament approved the 2023 State Budget on Thursday, with the votes of 93 lawmakers of the 136 present. The successful vote is the result of a deal forged between the coalition OLaNO, We Are Family and For the People parties with the opposition SaS party on support for the state budget. Slovakia's public finances deficit is set to swell from this year's almost 5 percent of GDP to 6.44 percent in 2023. Next year's seasonally adjusted deficit will equal 3.1 percent of GDP, a figure close to the current year's estimate (2.9 percent of GDP). The 2023 state budget was passed with the deficit to stand at €8.3 billion.
At a press conference on Thursday, Prime Minister Eduard Heger announced that the passing of the 2023 state budget by Parliament has averted the danger that people will not receive aid during the energy crisis. According to Heger, the passing of the budget is a Christmas gift to the public, as the state would not have been able to subsidise energy prices for households on a provisional budget. As he stated, aside from subsidising household energy, the budget will also support businesses, regions and municipalities, while allowing planned salary hikes in health care and education to take place.
Finance Minister Igor Matovic underlined that the state budget was approved with expenditures and incomes as drafted by the ministry. "We as the Finance Ministry saw 100-percent success," he said. According to Matovic, the opposition SaS party contradicted itself when it voted for the state budget despite its original demand for Matovic's resignation. The changes promoted by the liberals have not amended any of the budget's basic parameters, he stressed.
The 2023 budget that was approved by Parliament on Thursday has its shortcomings, but the SaS party did everything that could in the current situation to amend it, said its leader Richard Sulik on Thursday. As he added, spending limits were introduced in the budget and part of the funds from the general treasury have been allocated to Health and Justice Ministries at the request of SaS. Sulik acknowledged that the budget foresees significantly higher expenditures than revenues. "The deficit is immense. I want to believe that the situation will calm down next year, especially as regards inflation, and that we'll never have such a large deficit again," he remarked.
MPs working for the extra-parliamentary Voice-SD party supported in Parliament a reduction in value-added tax for the gastronomy sector to 10 percent and also the transfer of more than €800 million from the general treasury administration to the budgets of the Health and Justice Ministries, but they did not support the budget as a whole because the vote was not preceded by an agreement on an early parliamentary election, said the party on Thursday. "This budget is bad, it doesn't give people any hope for the future, and politicians have wasted the chance to adopt it along with the date of a snap election as a basic condition for ending the political crisis in Slovakia," said party leader Peter Pellegrini. He pointed out that the governing coalition pushed through the budget at the cost of the fall of the entire government and with the help of the opposition SaS party, which initially rejected it.
Source: TASR
