A government’s budget is the political exercise par excellence. Not only because it projects income and expenses to meet the provision of goods and services, but also makes plans and projects tangible, embodies the veracity of priorities. The budget is not only the main management tool, political judgment should pivot on it: the transition from muses to theatre, from poetry to prose, from declaration to action. If you ask me, it seems to me that the budget liquidation is even more important – which has been done in earnest – but this, which does not get even two lines in any newspaper, I have long considered it impossible.
There was a time, of course, when not having a budget was equivalent to not having a government, but in the last decade, in this self-proclaimed new age, this equivalence has stopped working. Rajoy governed for four years with Montoro’s extended budgets; Ayuso, three extensions in five years, and the Generalitat had to wait until 2022 to approve a budget in time and form since those of Montilla in 2010, to cite a few examples. Perhaps we need to go back to Maura when he warned us that “it’s one thing to govern and another to be in Government” to better understand what’s happening to us: we’re only interested in the second.
President Aragonès has called elections due to the impossibility of approving the budgets of a government in a clear minority. It would seem that ERC, given the mismanagement of the last decade, has decided to return to the basic principles of political management. However, although it is clear that I cannot prove it and that I could be very wrong, I think that the priority has been a calculation of relative strengths with respect to Junts, before the amnesty comes into force, and that management is more important to them soon little Not only because the actors themselves have despised it in recent years, also because in the choice of the lesser evil that is politics, Catalan problems, from the drought to education, cannot wait for this electoral cycle, which can perfectly end in repetition and last until the end of the year. Not approving a management budget as an excuse for not taking responsibility for it.
The argument of En Comú Podemos to overturn the budget is also showy and contradictory to what they are asking for in Madrid. They don’t like the Hard Rock, okay, but the project has been approved for years and with their vote they supported more than 100 million euros to do it in previous years. It’s not understanding that a tree does not make a forest, not knowing how to prioritize. In addition, the catechism tone they use to explain their reasons is, in my opinion, one of the main problems of the left today – although that would make for another article.
In politics, what is legal is moral. Because questioning the morality of an economic activity that provides jobs and pays taxes that you don’t reject is a weak argument and muddy ground, which would lead us to question not Hard Rock anymore but an infinite number of activities (from phone manufacturers to to the defense industry) that account for the majority of our GDP. Let’s talk about legal changes and economic alternatives if we want to be credible, and a little more secular!
And this seems to me to be the biggest contradiction of the next Catalan campaign. We will spend months neglecting management, even more, and talking about everything but this. With the invaluable help of Puigdemont, of course. Hopefully on May 12 the Catalans will vote for someone who wants to govern and not just be in the Government.
