The Spanish federal system has been faced with several accommodation and efficiency challenges before, but several phenomena previously unknown to it such as stagnation and fiscal crisis, combined with increasing economic divergence among regions and the strengthening of traditional centrifugal forces in some autonomous communities have made visible some of the problems of design and the risks ahead. By looking at some of the structural and immediate causes of the current predicaments and its ongoing or potential effects on several dimensions, the proposed paper argues that although the decentralized model or the ACs cannot be blamed for the fiscal crisis, due to several factors (electoral, institutional, structural), required fiscal consolidation measures were delayed until they were very difficult or impossible to accomplish. Moreover, responses to the crisis have reinforced, as was to be expected, several centralizing tendencies already present within the system, but the real effects are more complicated than that, since they have promoted some cooperative tendencies and even decentralizing tendencies. In any case, they have also aggravated other centrifugal tendencies also present in the system, since they have had consequences in authority and financial autonomy but also in symbolic, ideational or attitudinal aspects of the Spanish multilevel system.