The first secretary of the PSC, Salvador Illa, has ruled out “at this time” adding his votes to a motion of censure as other groups in Parliament such as Ciudadanos have proposed.
In an interview granted to RAC1, the socialist leader has reproached Pere Aragonès for the way in which he is approaching the approval of the 2023 budgets on which the Generalitat’s response to the crisis depends. : “I don’t understand how you can play this way with 3,098 million euros [this is the amount that could be added to the Generalitat’s spending capacity if it approves the budgets] that can be made available to the citizens of Catalonia. Seems like that’s not the way to do things.”
Illa has invited Aragonès to “sit down and talk” and has called on the president to be aware that his government has the exclusive support of 33 out of 135 deputies.
“Mr. Aragonès cannot claim that he can make the budgets he wants, I think he is not respectful of the Parliament of Catalonia and the will expressed by the Catalans at the polls,” he lamented.
The socialist leader has seen “a lot of confusion and few clear ideas” in the interview granted this Thursday on TV3 collected in which he insisted that Junts must support the budgets, something that has already been clearly ruled out by his former government partners. Illa accuses Aragonès of lacking a realistic view of his own political situation.
Yesterday, in his speech, Aragonès slipped the possibility of extending the budgets -as Oriol Junqueras suggested last Friday- and relativized the limitations that this extension could impose on the Generalitat government’s ability to manoeuvre.
In the interview, Aragonès once again ruled out calling elections in the middle of the crisis. “It’s the worst thing we could do right now,” he said. On this point, the PSC itself, and also Pedro Sánchez, to the extent that this electoral battle could destabilize their own government, are fully in agreement.
