The electoral advance will force the political parties to mobilize urgent economic resources to be able to pay for a decisive campaign. PSOE and PP are two formations that resort to bank loans as a method of financing while others, such as Sumar, Vox and ERC, finance themselves with their own resources or resorting to collaboration campaigns between their affiliates and supporters. With a view to the elections on July 23, the large banks have toughened their credit conditions by granting them under market conditions and, in some cases, have incorporated demanding and reinforced internal codes.
Socialists and popular have historically used bank loans to cover their electoral expenses. The main financier of the bipartisanship, through successive campaigns, was Banco Popular. An office located a few meters from the Congress of Deputies served as the epicenter of the business. It was an initiative of the historical president of the entity, Luis Valls-Taberner. The banker considered it appropriate to provide economic resources, in a transparent manner, to the electoral campaigns of the political parties and then, with the subsidies for their results, to recover the money advanced. With the purchase by Santander this activity was reduced and the entity chaired by Ana Botín gave a twist to the financing conditions.
Banco Santander will launch a new "political party financing policy" in this electoral campaign. According to the entity's document, prepared in 2020, after the last general ones, the granting of credits to PSOE and PP "will be considered exceptional and will be done with a restrictive nature, and must be approved or, in the case of operations from affiliated entities , validated by the executive committee of Grupo Santander, which can only authorize it under market conditions”. Santander cannot grant them “total or partial remissions”.
BBVA explains that financing requests for political acronyms must pass a risk analysis and that credits are always granted under market conditions. It refers to its code of conduct and appeals to "political neutrality" and "respect for pluralism". CaixaBank affirms that it does not grant credits to political parties.
PSOE and PP are currently designing their campaign strategies, where they will hold the rallies, where their leaders will travel, what type of means of transport they will have to rent and who their suppliers will be. When they have a budget, both formations plan to resort to banks to request the necessary financing.
They will do so, therefore, under tougher and, moreover, unfavorable conditions, especially since interest rates have risen sharply in the last year, making debt more expensive.
Resorting to bank loans has generated a debt that the two main parties have had to pay off in recent years. Each case is different. The latest published data date from the end of 2021, when the Socialists had a financial debt of almost 20 million euros and the popular ones of almost 18 million.
Both formations reveal the type of debt they have contracted and the expiration period. In the case of the PSOE, the credits that the party had pending amortization at the end of 2021 affected agreements with Santander, BBVA, Caixabank (some inherited from Bankia), Liberbank, Unicaja or Abanca. In the case of the PP, the loans were contracted with entities such as Santander (some of them a consequence of the acquisition of Popular), BBVA and Unicaja, or old savings banks such as CAM or Caja Duero. Also noteworthy is a loan of 37 million euros granted by Banesto and of which Genoa still owes 10 million.
Most of the loans are granted above 2% interest, although some, in the case of the PSOE, reach 4 and 5%. The amortization period reaches up to 35 years.
