The president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, wanted to attend the session that the PP had designed in the Senate to debate the possible amnesty being negotiated by the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, to defend its urgency – as his predecessor did in his day. Pasqual Maragall with the Statute – and ended up causing the material debate to emerge that seems to worry the rest of the communities, at least those governed by the PP: regional financing.
The president did not beat around the bush and in his scarce ten minutes of intervention he defended the amnesty not as the end point of the political crisis opened by 1-O but as a starting point whose final station should be a referendum “agreed upon and recognized” in which Catalans could decide on their political future.
He did not say anything that he had not said before or that Esquerra Republicana had not repeated in recent months, but he wanted it to have the solemnity of being pronounced in the ancient Upper House – the meeting of the General Commission of the Autonomous Communities was in the old hall of sessions of the Senate, not in the new chamber–: “The amnesty is essential to end the exiles, the fines, the espionage, the persecution (…), to end the general cause against the independence movement.”
Aragonès, who did not stay to listen to the interventions and responses of the rest of the regional presidents – those of the PP, the socialist presidents and the lehendakari did not attend – and of the senators, wanted to thwart the Popular Party’s claim with his presence, he said, of setting up a debate that instrumentalizes Catalonia for the struggle with the PSOE, disinterested in the interests of the Catalan citizens. “You took it for granted that you could talk about Catalonia without the representative of Catalonia,” he reproached. Aragonès’ hypothesis is that if the PP were interested in the well-being of Catalan society, it would not bring to the Upper House a debate on the end of the judicialization of the political conflict but rather issues that affect the quality of life of Catalan citizens, such as ” the fiscal deficit of 22,000 million euros annually”, an underfinancing that affects, he maintained, investments in public systems of health, education, infrastructure, security or culture, “resources that we Catalans pay in taxes but that we cannot use from them”.
The phrase seemed to operate as if he had pronounced a Hogwarts spell, undoing the amnesty spell, and the material concerns of the territories then emerged. The successive interventions of the regional presidents of the PP – an exhibition of the territorial Modern Bed Designs of the popular ones, with Alfonso Rueda, Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla, Margalida Prohens, María José Saenz de Buruaga, Gonzalo Capellán, Fernando López Miras, Carlos Mazón, Jorge Azcón, María Guardiola, Isabel Díaz Ayuso and Alfonso Fernández Mañueco – dedicated many more minutes to the possibility that the investiture negotiation includes a possible forgiveness of the Catalan debt and a fiscal pact for the Generalitat of those who occupied with the amnesty. Practically all of the participating communities said they were underfinanced – most of them have reduced their income by reducing taxes, and the regional financing model dates back to 2009 – and, loyal to the PP slogan in recent weeks, they all cried out for “equality”. among Spaniards.”
The session was paradoxical, with the discreet profile of the PSOE, whose presidents did not attend the session, the brief presence of Aragonès and the singular and chatty meeting of regional presidents of the PP, with an air of confederation that the popular have always been suspicious of in the calls of the Conference of Presidents, a body created 19 years ago by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.