Artur Mas, massism we should say, is back. The original, not the evolved Pokémon that gave hugs to the people of Cuba. Catalan chambers of commerce, employers’ associations and economic lobbies starred on Tuesday in their particular Return to Brideshead, Evelyn Waugh’s best novel. The story of a captain of the English army who returns to the ruins of an aristocratic mansion in which he spent part of his youth and remembers with nostalgic nostalgia a time already consumed.
The electoral offer with which CiU won the elections in 2010 returns with honors to the present. It’s been a decade and a half since that candle was lit. And it burned so fast that it ended up setting the curtains and the entire apartment on fire. Artur Mas himself remembers it in the book Cold Head, Hot Heart (Planeta, 2020), where he recalls the meetings with Mariano Rajoy and the final slamming of the door on the singular treatment of Catalan financing. Fourteen years later, with the help of economic and business organizations, an attempt is being made to return to the same point. Three times from goose to goose but backwards: pardons, amnesty and fiscal pact. From 2024 to 2010.
Make the past the present. The signatories of the document are involved in this and also, although with smaller mouths, ERC and Junts. In the case of the Republicans, the investiture agreement with the PSOE contemplates the constitution in the first quarter of this year (silent for the moment) of a State-Generalitat bilateral commission to address the issue of money. For their part, the junteros and socialists have also set this priority in their negotiations. Leaving the Lofca and transferring 100% of taxes is Carles Puigdemont’s letter to the kings.
So in the ruins of the Brideshead of massism there is no room for a soul. The entire business community and the two major parties of sovereignty are convinced that they want to live within those walls again: money, money, money. The past as prologue and fourteen years in between walking in a circle. Beyond the nationalists, the PSOE itself had in its 23-J electoral program a new financing system for 2024 and in its government agreement with Sumar it also committed, although without dates, to this legislature resolving the economic problems of the autonomous communities.
So much coincidence should serve to remove the board. Especially when the regional financing system has been out of date for ten years and survives thanks to the misunderstood exercise of charity by the central administration, based on handouts that are activated when the economic asphyxiation of some communities, including the Catalan one, turns their skin blue. .
But the reasons for optimism, no matter how many employer communications and investiture agreements we accumulate, are limited. Question of priorities. The silver bullets that sovereignty has counted on twice in a row have been used on other targets. That of ERC in the last legislature aimed at pardons. And the one of the present, fired at the same time by republicans and junteros, about the amnesty. The big game hunting season in the preserve of Sanchista’s third term, in sovereign terms, has ended. What we have to do now is small game. And the fiscal pact or federalized finances are a bear that is more difficult to defeat than the amnesty itself.
There are, however, those who see in the wasteland of socialist territorial power an opportunity for Pedro Sánchez to lose his temper on the issue of financing. The argument is that he cannot provoke the autonomous socialist governments because they have ceased to exist. This is certainly a willful view, since a financing model that benefits Catalonia to the detriment of other communities will leave the discomfort caused by the law of criminal oblivion a child’s play. The amnesty makes many very angry, true; But we must not forget that it has the advantage of being free for the pockets of the rest of Spain. Thus, more silver bullets will be needed. And of those, only one is distributed per legislature, as long as luck is on its side. It is known now and it was known in 2010. Return to Brideshead. A novel.
