Predictability. For Pere Aragonès, this aptitude is basic to being reliable. In his opinion, ERC and then its Government have demonstrated this since 2018 and 2019, with a strategic change fully oriented towards dialogue and negotiation with the PSOE governments. Other avenues, such as that of confrontation that Junts has championed for years, have given, in his opinion, “few practical and positive results.” Added to this factor are the constant “changes of opinion” that Aragonès has attributed to Carles Puigdemont and which give him little credibility, as the national coordinator of the Republicans has also implied.
Aragonès has criticized the unity that Puigdemont demands. “It must be demonstrated with facts,” he stressed while recalling that JxCat left the Government in October 2022. “There was the feeling that we had the opposition within the Government,” he said regarding the post-convergents. In any case, he has avoided commenting on how to remake the unit. “I have had my hand extended and it has not been reciprocated,” he has limited himself to pointing out. The leader of Junts, on the other hand, recently stated that the first person he would call if he was ready to become president again would be Aragonès.
Be that as it may, the ERC candidate for the Parliament elections on May 12 has confirmed that the negotiation path will be blocked at some point if the PP takes over Moncloa. “This window of opportunity will close and Catalonia” has to take advantage of it, the head of the Government expressed at a breakfast organized by Nueva Economia Fórum, in Barcelona, ??which is why he urged voters to opt for his party “to give a great “leap forward” that would take shape in an agreed referendum, the own financing that has insistently demanded for Catalonia and social well-being.
Aragonès’ reasoning is that unlike the last Spanish legislature, Pedro Sánchez does not have the Ciudadanos option as an alternative route for pacts, hence he speaks of a “window of opportunity” to achieve all these objectives.
For the president, a Government led by Salvador Illa, PSC candidate, would also jeopardize the possibility of a referendum or singular financing. Until the transfer of Rodalies, “in which he has no interest.” Aragonès has also disgraced the PSC for having gone from defending linguistic immersion to the trilingualism proposed by Ciudadanos.
The event was presented by the Minister of Economy during the mandates of Artur Mas, Andreu Mas-Colell, who has supported the ERC candidate: “It is good, I think, that today the Generalitat is led with a spirit like his” . Aragonès has x-rayed the Catalan economic situation. He said that “it’s going well” and highlighted that Catalonia has record export figures and growth above the European average, whose forecast for this year is a growth of 2.1%.
He has also highlighted that the unemployment rate is the lowest in the last fifteen years and has stressed that reindustrialization projects are being carried out that “are a reality, and not just planning”, such as the arrival of Chery to the old Nissan plant. At the same time, he has assured that Catalonia has a great opportunity by making a leap in research and knowledge.
During breakfast, Aragonès announced that he will place administrative simplification at the center of the legislature, if he is re-elected president. “Bureaucracy becomes a brake,” he has recognized and justified that the reform can be carried out now and not in the previous legislature “because first it was necessary to bring public services up to date”: 30% of the administration workers “They were interim, while now they represent 8%.”
