Yesterday, Parliament buried the Generalitat’s budget for 2024 off to a good start, and with it the Catalan legislature. The agreement that the Government had concluded with the PSC was of no use if it did not do the same with the commons, who decided to maintain their firm opposition to the Hard Rock until the end. Neither the pressure via Madrid, which Jéssica Albiach denounced and rejected, nor the Government’s last-minute agreement offers, which the leader of the commons called “toast to the sun” and “wet paper”, doubled the his will
The result was a plenum with cross reproaches and a controversy served at the time of voting. At 1:35 p.m., the last intervention of non-affiliated deputy Cristina Casol – formerly of Junts – ended, who announced that she would vote in favor of the budgets, and the president of Parliament, Anna Erra, decided to postpone the vote. The reason, the absence of a Vox deputy, whose vote tipped the scales.
Without the presence of that deputy, the tie at 67 seats caused the budgets to remain alive, as the amendments presented in their entirety were rejected, but the stoppage allowed the parliamentarian to reach the chamber and finally vote. Result, 67 votes to 68 and a setback for the ERC Government.
The budgets fell and President Aragonès took the floor to ask for a stoppage in order to convene the extraordinary meeting of the Government to discuss with the electoral advance under his arm.
If the final moments of the plenary session were tense, with angry protests from the Republican group over Erra’s decision to postpone the vote, so was the debate. The Minister of Economy, the first to intervene, reviewed the economic consequences of not having the 2,443 million more that could have been spent this year. Game by game, he concluded: “We won’t have that either.” And he ended with a political criticism of the commons, for “incoherence” and “electoralism”.
Albiach’s reply was also harsh. He accused ERC of “pressuring, threatening and blackmailing” instead of reaching out, and of “taking on the program of the right” with the Hard Rock. The leader of the commons drew a Government “incapable of leading” and an ERC that “has not stood up” to the demands of the PSC, which “has not led or set limits”.
Even so, he still had time to leave a minimal loophole open to the president: “If he rectifies, we will withdraw the amendment”, he encouraged, and even bet to approve all the spending increases that the Government could present separately in Parliament after running out of budgets.
Another of the hardest interventions was Junts. The president of the group, Albert Batet, was one of the few who made the electoral advance slide after lashing out at the “slump” in which the Catalan Executive has fallen since his party broke the governing coalition. The post-convergent criticized the Government for seeking “a simple accession, instead of a negotiation” of budgets with his group, but he again put on the table his party’s proposal for an agreement, based on a reduction tax that the Government rejected because it would mean a decrease in income of 1.2 billion euros. “For a minimum of patriotism, it’s up to them to rectify or call elections”, said Batet.
The PSC accused Junts and the CUP of being “responsible for all the policies” of the Government during the last 10 years, but, above all, against the commons, which it accused of electoralism for having turned after supporting the Government in the last three years with the Hard Rock in the middle. “What has changed? That we are at the end of the legislature and the communes are in electoral mode”, concluded spokeswoman Alicia Romero.
The CUP justified its budget veto due to the agreement with “the greyest and most right-wing PSC in history”, and the PP, Ciutadans and Vox charged against the “elephant” structure of public bodies and entities and the “fiscal hell” of Catalonia.
