The chips on the Spanish political board received a new shakeup this Wednesday from Catalonia, and not because of something already volcanic, such as the amnesty law, which is being voted on this Thursday in Congress. In a new unforeseen turn, the president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, called early elections for May 12 after running out of a majority to carry out the Budget law. He did it this Wednesday in a show of giving a coup of authority on the table and in an attempt to revive his party, Esquerra Republicana, anemic in the polls despite controlling the Generalitat alone and sharing with the rest of the nationalist parties and independentistas the key to the governability of Spain.
Catalonia thus returns to a situation of uncertainty thanks, precisely, to a president who has made a point of wanting to give predictability and certainty to a Catalonia that is still recovering from the scars of 10 years of failed independence process. Aragonès justified the electoral call with the argument that certainties cannot be offered without Budgets approved in a timely manner. And that ERC had reached an agreement with the socialists of Salvador Illa to carry them forward. He was only missing two votes, which the script said would come from the commons, because if ERC voted for the Budgets of Pedro Sánchez and Yolanda Díaz, Sumar’s representative in Catalonia would do the same in the Generalitat. This was not the case after the commons were convinced that they could not give way to Aragonès’ Budgets as long as he did not renounce an extra-budgetary project but of great ideological caliber, such as the authorization of a megacasino next to the Port Aventura theme park, in Tarragona. “The red lines and the blockades of each other have led to the Budgets of the Generalitat with the most resources in history being rejected,” lamented the president in a solemn appearance at the Palau de la Generalitat. Faced with this blockade scenario, the head of the Government He defended new elections and thus “moved the country forward without immobility.”
But the immobility that Aragonès said he wanted to overcome will now inevitably be established in the rest of the political landscape. The first consequence is that Catalonia will not have Budgets this year, despite being in an emergency situation due to drought, with dozens of pending works and emergencies of all kinds in health and education. And the accounts included an extra 2.4 billion in investments that will either not see the light of day or will do so in fits and starts based on decrees and credit extensions. The central government is also left without Budgets. President Pedro Sánchez already gave the order yesterday afternoon to interrupt work to prepare the 2024 accounts and begin preparing those for 2025. With his Catalan and Basque partners fighting over elections in their respective fiefdoms, the balance is It seemed impossible. Also in Barcelona there will be consequences. The socialist Jaume Collboni will have to wait if he wants to incorporate ERC into his municipal government, as all the movements of recent days indicated. “Everything is interrupted,” sources close to the president of the Generalitat added yesterday.
The Puigdemont mystery
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The big unknown, however, remains whether the times of politics will fit with those of the judges and whether Puigdemont will be able to set foot, without risk of being arrested, in the Parliament of Catalonia when the chamber has to be formed at the beginning of June to later , vote for the president of the Generalitat. Puigdemont maintains that it will be possible, but ERC greatly doubts it and the party that the pro-independence voters would not endure another campaign in which Puigdemont or his entourage promise without a solid legal basis that he will return to Catalonia in a timely manner to assume an eventual presidency of the Generalitat. “Probably, Puigdemont will not be able to be an effective candidate,” summarizes those around Pere Aragonès.
The fourth party in contention, the Commons, will be able to test whether its new strategy of tough opposition has results after knocking down some expansive accounts and having lost its great showcase last May, which was the Barcelona Mayor’s Office of Ada Colau. Both ERC and the PSC point to the Commons as an “irresponsible” party that has not risen to the situation and that puts the very stability of the PSOE and Sumar coalition government at risk by preventing it from having Budgets this year. Yolanda Díaz, who contacted Aragonès directly to try to save the situation, was unable to get her sister party in Catalonia, the Commons, to change its mind about the Catalan accounts. In the Palau de la Generalitat they are especially critical of Díaz’s role, since they consider that he has confused his will and his commitment not to interfere in the decisions of the commons with a policy of sitting down that not only hinders Catalan politics but also , as has been seen, the plans of the Government of which it is a part. “It is highly irresponsible,” these sources insist. They also point directly to Ada Colau: “Barcelona has had a lot of influence on everything that has happened.” This means that since Colau has lost its great showcase of the Mayor’s Office of the Catalan capital, the incentives of the common people to reach agreements in the Parliament have been significantly reduced and for Colau in particular, without Budgets to approve in the Barcelona City Council. , there was no longer interest in agreeing anything in the Catalan chamber.
The qualitative leap last Sunday was that the frontal rejection of Hard Rock no longer came only from the leader of the commons in Catalonia, Jéssica Albiach, but also from the representative of this political space in the Government, Ernest Urtasun, Minister of Culture. At a party event, Urtasun said that Catalonia could not rely on the recovery after the process to “developmental” projects. It was the last straw at the Palau de la Generalitat. This disagreement between the commons and ERC seriously affects the option of a left-wing tripartite government in Catalonia, with ERC, the PSC and the commons, which Ada Colau’s party has always demanded.
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