It was an anomaly that Pere Aragonès continued as president with only 33 of the 135 deputies supporting him in Parliament. He presided over a government with assisted breathing since Junts left the Executive in October 2022 for unconvincing reasons.
The budgets have been the cause and pretext for Aragonès to decide to advance the elections to May 12. For strategic reasons, but also because of the agony of a government that had run out of fuel, with a road map that led nowhere.
The trigger for the budget stumble was a macro leisure complex in Salou, the Hard Rock, which does not exist and possibly will not exist. It wasn’t even in the budget project that was defeated on Wednesday in Parliament and that has gone to a better life with hundreds of millions of euros that will not be invested in Catalonia.
The PSC of Salvador Illa supported ERC, but the votes of the commons were required to push forward the budgets. In the apparent interdependence between the governments of Catalonia and Spain, the mechanisms were activated. Aragonès pressured Pedro Sánchez to, in turn, tell Yolanda Díaz to inform Jéssica Albiach that it was necessary to approve the processing of the Catalan budgets on the eve of the day on which, precisely, Congress would vote on the Amnesty law.
The commons said no. There will be no budgets in Catalonia or Spain. Díaz loses the dwindling strength he had in the coalition Government after proving that he does not control the Sumar franchise in Catalonia. The commons have shot themselves in the foot and deepened the widening political rift between Sánchez and Díaz, a coalition that is going through very low hours.
The electoral battle will have two scenarios: the one between the pro-independence parties and the one between the PSC and the commons. It will be necessary to see what the PP and Vox and the split parties of independence achieve. In short, which candidate will be able to have the absolute majority to be invested. Ah! and let’s see what they say about education, health, Europe, immigration, drought, agriculture, poverty, infrastructure… After so many debates about what we are, we must move on to what we do. The political authority of a good government dedicated to managing is missing.
