The pre-Christmas atmosphere, the good wishes for 2014 and the budgets of the Generalitat for next year, still in their infancy, were the protagonists this Wednesday of the last control session of the Government and the president of the year in the Parliament of Catalonia. The head of the Catalan Executive, Pere Aragonès, has expressed on several occasions his intention to “speed up” the negotiation with the parliamentary groups to approve the accounts, after the Minister of Economy and Finance, Natàlia Mas, had assured that they were in willingness to take the accounting project to the plenary session of the Catalan Chamber for processing this week if necessary, except for the fact that they lack the necessary support.
Aragonès has extended his hand to negotiate with the PSC, Junts and the CUP, although the latter two have taken advantage of their intervention to show the colors of the Executive for various issues. The head of the opposition and first secretary of the Catalan socialists, Salvador Illa, on the other hand, has elided the criticism that the other group presidents had previously expressed on issues such as education and the poor results of Catalan students in the PISA reports, the drought or aspects related to security such as multiple recidivism and has limited itself to asking that “the current policy” be imposed in 2024.
“Let it not be a year of loss and inertia, let it not be a year of occupying the Government but of governing,” stated the socialist leader. “I’m willing to help,” he concluded.
Albert Batet, president of the JxCat group, has listed his group’s wishes for next year in different areas as a Christmas poem, although he has included at the end of each request a tagline to disgrace the Aragonès Executive for its drift, as the president later remarked. The drought, education, health and the situation of nurses, the issue of repeat offenders, the poor functioning of Rodalies, large country projects such as the B-40, the expansion of the El Prat airport or the Hard Rock and that expatriated independence leaders can return were on the list of wishes and conditions to be resolved to negotiate the budgets.
The CUP, for its part, has reproached the president for the delay in responding to the proposals relating to the budgets that the anti-capitalists delivered to the Government in a two-page document in his meeting with the Minister of the Presidency, Laura Vilagrà, and the holder of Economics and Finance, Mas.
More tense has been the crossing with the commons, previously a regular partner and advance party in the budget negotiation, with the head of the Catalan Executive. After the reproaches of Jéssica Albiach in the management due to the aforementioned drought or the situation of the educational sector, Aragonès has used the data from the latest barometer of the Center d’Estudis d’Opinió (CEO), in which the Catalan administration approves for the voters of all parties except those of Vox, PP and Ciudadanos. It is not lost on anyone that without Barcelona City Council as part of the budget equation, En Comú Podem’s negotiating position has hardened.
The note of humor has come with the intervention of the leader of Cs, Carlos Carrizosa, who has taken advantage of the turn to try to wear down the PSC, Illa, and in the process provoke laughter and some applause from the other groups by saying that the orange formation “is nothing to write home about” but it will last and there are already surveys that give them an improvement at the polls. And if Carrizosa has regretted that Aragonès’s meeting with Pedro Sánchez, in which, according to the orange spokesperson, “major national issues, constitutional issues and everyone’s money” will be addressed, will be “in the dark”, the president has assured that it will be lit the light.
Carrizosa, who sees in the socialists’ agreements with Junts and ERC a possibility of rising at the polls, has referred to Sánchez’s agreements with the independence movement as “an outrage.” “They have lied to their voters, they carry out Puigdemont’s program, not that of the PSC. They promised the opposite, we Catalans will not forget what the PSC is doing to revive sovereignty,” she said. The PP, in turn, has used as a battering ram the Government’s foreign action and some of the disappointments of the Catalan head of the Executive’s trips abroad, as happened in Latin America, and Vox has focused its question on security. “Nothing new,” Aragonès snapped.
