The former president of the Generalitat Artur Mas has been skeptical that JxCat makes his vote conditional on the decrees that sanction companies that changed their headquarters in 2017 and do not want to return to Catalonia, since “someone cannot be sanctioned for taking a free decision to stay or leave.
This was stated in statements to La 2 and Ràdio 4, in which, however, Mas said he “shared” JxCat’s “wake-up call” to the Government by demanding that it withdraw its first three decree laws and agree on them. This Wednesday, Congress begins the debate on three decrees with economic content – the eighth package of measures against inflation, the unemployment benefit reform and an omnibus rule that includes the public service law -, whose validation is at risk since Junts announced that he will vote against.
According to the former Catalan president, “from the first moment we must make the Government of Pedro Sánchez understand that this investiture will not be a haven of peace” (‘una bassa d’oli’), but rather that “everything that passes through the Spanish Parliament “You have to negotiate it before.” “It is the first warning that this will be a very complicated navigation,” although for Mas “the ideal” would be for the legislature to last four years.
On the other hand, Mas has encouraged the independence parties to “stand up” before the Government of Pedro Sánchez to demand a fiscal pact that grants Catalonia the same tax powers that the Basque Country and Navarra have with the economic agreement, after remembering that he himself claimed this bilateral financing model for Catalonia to Mariano Rajoy in 2012, but the then president of the Spanish Government closed the door to that possibility, which led to an acceleration of the independence process.
Now, according to Mas, with the parliamentary arithmetic in the Cortes, a new opportunity presents itself to rescue that demand in the negotiation tables that ERC and JxCat have open with the PSOE. “A referendum on the independence of Catalonia, I am very afraid, will not come out in this negotiation,” Mas acknowledged, which is why in his opinion there must be “some other major country issue” on the table, and “the bilateral fiscal pact makes it possible.” is”.
For Mas, “the independence parties must stand up and make the PSOE understand that the Catalan demand is to have its own financing system” that allows the Catalan Parliament “to have the same legislative powers” as the Basque Parliament and that “the tax agency depends of the government of Catalonia, exactly in the same way that the Basque tax agencies depend on the provincial councils”. This would allow “all taxes to be collected and managed in Catalonia”, without denying “solidarity” with other Spanish territories, because “a calculation cannot be made that destabilizes all of Spain”, he reasoned.
Likewise, he has been skeptical that JxCat makes its vote conditional on the decrees that sanction companies that changed their headquarters in 2017 and do not want to return to Catalonia, since “someone cannot be sanctioned for making a free decision to stay. or leave.”
