The Minister of the Interior Joan Ignasi Elena will not be the only one who is disapproved by Parliament in this legislature. This approbation will be joined by the Minister of Social Rights, Carles Campuzano, who in recent weeks has been at the target of the opposition in Catalonia for his promise in Santa Coloma de Gramenet together with the ERC candidate, Gabriel Rufián, that he will build a geriatric residence if the republican party rules in the city after the next municipal elections in May.
The minister’s promise provoked the ire of Junts, who were the first to demand the appearance of the minister in Parliament to give public explanations for his slip, and this week they demanded that President Pere Aragonès disavow the minister for it. The refusal of the head of the Government pushed the post-convergents to register a parliamentary motion proposing the disapproval of Campuzano, an initiative to which the PSC has joined, which this Monday will present another in which it also promotes its disapproval for an action that represents a “undermining of the institutions of Catalonia and an inappropriate use of the post of Minister of the Generalitat”.
Junts and PSC once again take the initiative to censure a Minister of the Generalitat, as they did with Elena at the end of November, after the departure of the post-convergent members of the Aragonès Executive and in full negotiations with the socialists for the 2023 budgets, for the “instrumentalization” and “politicization” of the minister in the Mossos d’Esquadra body, as a result of the changes in the police leadership.
The gesture was intended to put the Government in front of the mirror, evidencing its parliamentary weakness. The same is happening now, at the gates of the municipal elections and with burning issues such as the drought or the restructuring of the general directorate of the Catalan police, on which the Government has approved separate decrees without prior negotiation with parliamentary groups.
The motions of Junts and the PSC will be debated and voted on in the plenary session of the Parliament scheduled for after Easter (from April 18 to 20) and socialist sources assume that the two will go ahead by majority. In fact, after the first contacts with the rest of the groups, they expect the minister to be disapproved by a large majority of the Chamber, unlike Elena’s disapproval, which was possible thanks to the abstention of Junts y los comunes. Thus, the disapproval will occur before the minister appears before the social rights commission, as planned, on April 24.
The PSC motion emphasizes the urgent shortcomings of Catalonia in the field of residences. The Socialists have been denouncing the lack of planning on the part of the Government for the construction and agreement of places, something that the minister himself admitted in Parliament but assured that it was about to be corrected. For this reason, the PSC-Units group claims in the motion to present this planning within three months.
They also demand to raise rates by 4% in the entire social sector -with retroactive effect from January 1- to improve the remuneration and working conditions of professionals who work in the sector, and in the case of the Santa Coloma residence promised by Campuzano, they require the Government to build it charged to a credit modification in the current budgets of the Generalitat, agreed precisely with the PSC and the commons.
The minister had the opportunity to explain this matter in plenary session this week, during a questioning from the Socialists. Campuzano alleged that the controversy over the residence of Santa Coloma only seeks “the wear and tear of the Government” and reproached the PSC that, on the other hand, “the attention to the dependency matters little to them.” In this sense, the minister shifted the focus to blame the State for the “underfinancing” of the dependency system. “The State does not comply with its legal obligation to transfer resources for dependency aid” but “this does not seem to matter to you,” he said.
The Socialist deputy, Raúl Moreno, demanded that Campuzano apologize for “frivolity”, “a shameful episode” and “a very big nonsense”, in reference to the promise in Santa Coloma, and reminded him that the Generalitat has not built not a single new residence in 10 years.
