Airs of change in the Cercle d’Economia, where the outgoing president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, and the presidential candidate with the most options, Salvador Illa, met this Wednesday for the first time after the elections. Aragonès said goodbye to Cercle, warning that the welfare state in Catalonia is at risk without a new financing model that grants more resources to the community. “Either there is a significant agreement on financing or Catalonia of eight million inhabitants will not be able to pay it,” he warned during the opening session of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cercle, which will last until tomorrow, Friday.
According to Aragonès, the spending ceiling can be reached next year, especially with the reintroduction of fiscal rules in Europe, which will limit the growth of public budgets. He said it during the conversation he had with the president of Cercle, Jaume Guardiola, who praised the gesture that Aragonès had when announcing last week that he would leave the front line of politics once the new Government is formed. The president of Cercle also wanted to thank the disposition that Aragonès has always shown towards Cercle, unlike the discreet relationship established with the two previous presidents, Carles Puigdemont and Quim Torra. Some members remembered that it went directly from former president Artur Mas (also present in the room yesterday) to Aragonès.
In the presentation of the conference, Guardiola insisted on demanding from the political parties “mainstreaming” and “getting out of their blocks” to “make an agreement with those who have conflicting visions.” Although in the opinion note made public last week the Cercle suggested the option of an agreement between the PSC and Junts, yesterday Guardiola opened the range of possibilities and said that “we must explore all” the pact options to avoid falling into an electoral repetition. He recalled that in the last 14 years there have been six electoral calls. Aragonès declined to comment on possible post-electoral pacts out of consistency with his decision to leave the front line of politics.
The mayor of Barcelona, ??Jaume Collboni, also intervened as is traditional with a brief speech in which he called to stop the far right in the European elections.
This year’s edition of the conference is titled “The world on trial. “Strategies to boost productivity and well-being in times of change.” Guardiola repeated the warnings issued last week about the dangers of continuing with low productivity, although he was not as catastrophic. Aragonès claimed and praised the milestones achieved in economic matters beyond productivity. “We left the country better than we found it,” he reflected.
Aragonès assured that the Catalan economy today is a “robust” economy and that it can face “with greater solidity.” He did not forget that during his term the community had to face a pandemic, extremely high inflation and problems such as the war in Ukraine or the drought. Regarding the figures, he highlighted that the unemployment rate is at the lowest level in the last 16 years. In the first quarter of the year it stood at 9.5%. And he defended – as he has done throughout the legislature – the effort to reindustrialize the country. He gave as an example the investments of Kronospan, Lotte or Chery. In terms of innovation, the president highlighted Astrazeneca’s commitment to Barcelona.
Specifically regarding productivity, Aragonés recognized that there is room for improvement after in recent years the economy has undergone a “tertiarization” process with the rise of very labor-intensive sectors. First construction and then tourism and commerce. That is why he regretted that the non-approval of the budgets has left some 1,000 million euros earmarked for innovation undistributed.
