The president of the PP of Catalonia, Alejandro Fernández, has starred this Thursday in an informative breakfast of Barcelona Tribuna, a cycle organized by the Barcelona Economic Society of Friends of the Country, a bicentennial institution founded in 1822 that is currently chaired by Miquel Roca. “Catalonia continues to be a community with its potentialities intact for the future, but for this it must leave behind the drift of decadence of the last ten years, those of the independence process,” explained Fernández.
After the inauguration of the event, held at the Meliá hotel in the Catalan capital, which was officiated by Miquel Roca, the mayor of Badalona, ??Xavier García Albiol, introduced the speaker, highlighting his municipal career in Tarragona and his “political vocation country”, without forgetting his “oratory skills”, for which he appointed him spokesman in Parliament when he himself chaired the Catalan PP. “You have to recognize his ability to finely convey his thoughts and his way of understanding Catalonia,” stressed Albiol, for whom Fernández’s position has not been “easy” in recent years.
For his part, Fernández pointed out that he is not the only one who refers to the current state of Catalonia as “decline, loss of leadership or decadence” and recalled that these same approaches have been expressed by the Cercle d’Economia, which in his last note speaks of “slow, inexorable decline and economic irrelevance”; Jaime Malet, president of the United States Chamber of Commerce in Spain; the employers’ association Foment del Treball or even the historic union leader Joan Coscubiela.
With this diagnosis, and without wanting to abound, as he has proclaimed, in “catastrophism”, Fernández has issued his recipe for the healing of the Catalan economy, an objective that he has set as one of the main ones that Alberto Núñez Feijóo will have if reaches the presidency of the Spanish Government after the next general elections on July 23.
Based on the therapy proposed in the book ¡Liberaos!, by his fellow ranks Juan Milián, councilor of the PP in the Barcelona City Council, Fernández has raised the defense of liberal values, the abandonment of indignation and the return to the responsibility as principles from which to return to the path of progress, “substituting the culture of no for the culture of yes to everything that works”.
In an academically structured speech, the leader of the PP has outlined the six points on which, from his point of view, it would be necessary to influence urgently to reverse the decline that he observes in Catalonia: 1) the paralysis of large structures, 2) the rejection of holding major events, 3) tourismophobia, 4) the ineffective hydraulic policy, 5) the lack of respect for private property and 6) the “failed” educational policy of the Government, which it considers “full of ideological prejudices “.
“Fleeing from victimhood and madriditis” that has characterized, in his opinion, recent Catalonia is part of the therapy, since Fernández believes that this has been “erroneous conduct” that has led to decadence. To overcome it, he has called for dialogue between governments and to recover the lost institutional prestige. “Madrid has been the capital since 1561 and until ten years ago that did not seem like a problem for the progress of Barcelona and Catalonia”, recalled the leader of the Catalan PP, for whom the confrontation between communities is “unsuccessful”.
In this sense, Fernández has called for self-criticism from all the Catalan political forces and has called for a transversal agreement to recover economic leadership, which requires overcoming the “inferiority complex” that manifests itself, in his opinion, in the constant comparison with the Madrid figures, an attitude that has been blamed on Enric Juliana, deputy director of La Vanguardia and head of the delegation in the capital, who has described in his chronicles the “turboeconomy” of recent years. All in all, a new financing agreement would require loyalty on the Catalan side and should be applicable to the whole of Spain, circumstances that do not occur, he believes, when the pro-independence supporters say “ho tornarem a fer”.
“They are not for the work”, lamented Fernández, who has criticized that Catalonia has been “absent” from the forums for dialogue between communities and with the Government of Spain and has been “damaged” by its abandonment of the institutions.
In question time, Roca questioned whether Catalonia is in decline or that that word is the most appropriate to describe the situation and asked Fernández if the PP should not also be self-critical. However, the leader of the popular Catalans has denied that his party has not made an analysis of the poor results in the last regional elections and has recalled that Catalan nationalism has often held the key to governability in Spain, and has insisted, without yielding to your host’s suggestion, in which decline, such as decline or loss of leadership, seems to you an accurate description.
