While this Wednesday Pere Aragonès was the star of an informative breakfast in Madrid, already in the middle of the pre-campaign for the Catalan elections on May 12, Pedro Sánchez defined this new appointment with the polls as “a great opportunity to turn the page and leave behind the fracture of the year 2017”, despite all those political formations that, he has also warned in reference to the Popular Party bench, “look with longing” at that acceleration of the independence process that ended like the rosary of dawn.
The President of the Government has taken advantage of the question posed to him by the Junts per Catalunya spokesperson, Miriam Nogueras, in the control session of Congress, to highlight “the great lesson that we have to draw” about the events experienced in the last decade: “Catalonia cannot advance if it does so alone and does so divided.”
Sánchez has defended his commitment to “coexistence”, to redirect the Catalan political conflict, since he arrived at the Moncloa in 2018. And he has trusted that Catalan citizens will value this policy of detente, when it comes to attending the elections. polls next 12-M.
Nogueras has reproached Sánchez that the withdrawal of the general state budgets for 2024, as soon as Aragonès called the elections, “is an electoral campaign decision, not a country decision.” “He had to show his letters, which he knows perfectly well that they will not be liked in Catalonia,” said the Junts spokesperson about said public accounts. And if he has renounced them, he has assured, it is to favor the campaign of the PSC candidate for 12-M, former minister Salvador Illa.
The President of the Government, however, has once again deployed his service record in Catalonia. And he has assured that, under his mandate, “Catalonia has had record financing and record public investment coming from the general administration of the State.” Sánchez has thus listed the keys to his Catalan agenda, with the creation of the dialogue table between governments, “to resolve the political conflict in Catalonia”, or the reactivation of the bilateral commissions contemplated in the Statute, which have managed to reduce conflict. institutional between both administrations and advance in the transfer of Rodalies and the management of the minimum vital income.
“We are making a clear commitment to coexistence, economic development and the extension of rights,” Sánchez defended. “We are making a decisive commitment to self-government,” he assured, in the face of “the rupture” with Spain that he has attributed to the formation of Carles Puigdemont, or “the recentralization” that he has blamed on the Popular Party. “We are committed to coexistence. And betting on coexistence in Catalonia means betting on self-government,” he assured. He has also hoped that, starting on 12-M, it could be with a president of the socialist Generalitat. That is, with Salvador Illa.
