By Chrysostomos Tsoufis

A fiscal “field of glorious glory” is slowly starting to take shape as everything shows that the government that will emerge from the elections will… inherit significant fiscal space to use as they see fit.

With a caretaker government, the execution of the budget “gallops”, producing in the first 4 months of the year €1.6 billion more tax revenue compared to the initial estimates. The receipts from VAT but also income tax are the ones driving the budget vehicle with broken brakes.

In the SEC they literally rub their eyes with what they see as well as him April – which is traditionally one of the flats of the year – tax revenues exceeded the targets by €200m.

To these very positive fiscal figures, the course of which is expected to continue since there is no visible reason to stop it, must be added the first estimates for the course of tourism which speak of an additional €2 billion in revenue compared to last year.

…mantas are equally auspicious on the spending front. With the price of natural gas stuck in the region of €35/Mwh the budget takes a very deep breath as it has been structured with the assumption that the price of gas will be at €120. The calculations show a relief of the public funds by about €4.2 billion (about 2 units of GDP) which is directly added to the domestic product, if of course the price of natural gas is maintained at this level. Of course, as an official of the Ministry of Finance explained, it could go even lower as it is not excluded that Russia – under financial pressure due to the sanctions – will reopen the taps of its pipelines in the autumn and then the prices will sink.

All these factors have created a climate of optimism in the Ministry of Finance that the final primary surplus of the year will be considerably higher than the 0.7% of GDP of the estimates (approximately €1.54 billion). How much could this primary result be? An order of magnitude is given by the Commission which, in its own calculations in the text of its spring forecasts, estimates that Greece will end the year with a surplus of approximately 1.9%, i.e. €2.6 billion more than what Athens estimates (the National Bank in her own analysis she raises it even further to 2%).

But here there is an asterisk. The Brussels they estimate this much better result with a growth rate of 2.4% which, as we mentioned before, is now considered a very conservative estimate. It is therefore worth wondering what the surplus could reach with 2 additional growth units and what fiscal margins the new Greek government will have to manage in the last year before the Commission reinstates the fiscal straitjacket for achieving specific goals.