Catalan politics continues to be embroiled in possible pacts after Sunday’s elections and if the two hours of the Sixth debate, held tonight and moderated by Ana Pastor, have added any incentive, they have been two pieces of evidence: the first is that Salvador Illa, The PSC candidate is today the apex of the Catalan electoral battle and, secondly, the positions of the two main pro-independence forces, ERC and Junts, seem increasingly irreconcilable in this campaign.
Pere Aragonès, current president and candidate of ERC, and Josep Rull, representing Carles Puigdemont’s party, have faced each other on multiple occasions. They have clashed over the reasons why the independence movement, with a large majority in this legislature, has ended up broken; They have clashed in the management of the drought, in housing – Rull has accused the current Government of hyperregulation in this matter –, they have clashed in matters of taxes, in matters of infrastructure – the airport – and they have clashed in education.
Aragonès recalled that they have incorporated 9,000 teachers in this legislature thus making up for the cuts in the education system of the old Convergence governments… the matrix of the current Junts.
On the issue of housing, the Comuns Sumar candidate, Jéssica Albiach, has issued a warning: she will not support a government “that does not put the housing problem at the center.” Illa has promised to build 200,000 apartments by 2030 in collaboration, she stated, with the City Councils.
There has also been time for financing and taxes. Vox, PP, Ciudadanos but also Junts have blamed the current Catalan government for excessive tax voracity. A voracity that Alejandro Fernández, of the Popular Party, has also reproached Junts, which was part of the Generalitat government during a period of this legislature.
Pere Aragonès and, in part, also Salvador Illa have recalled that Catalonia delivers many more resources to the common treasury of Spain than it receives. However, the socialist leader has assured that the solution to this problem involves “loyalty and negotiation,” reproaching Aragonés for his absence from the tables for the pact of a new model.
The Republican candidate, on the contrary, has defended “singular financing for Catalonia”, that is, outside the common system of the rest of the autonomous communities. For ERC and Junts, they do agree on that, the solution is a kind of economic concert similar to the Basque one and perhaps, someday, independence.
In the last quarter of the debate, Ana Pastor raised the question of Amnesty. For the Popular Party, Ciudadanos and Vox, the law of criminal oblivion is unacceptable. Alejandro Fernández of the PP has assured that the law will allow “this madness [the pocès] to continue indefinitely.” Only Salvador Illa has explicitly defended the law to turn the page “on the last ten years in which Catalonia has been paralyzed.”
Aragonès and Rull have gone further. The Amnesty is, in their opinion, one more step on the path that should lead them to the self-determination referendum. The leader of the socialists has expressed the opposite opinion because he considers, he has said, that “it would be divisive for Catalan society.”
