If it depends on the PSC, the negotiation to reach an agreement on the 2023 budgets will go on for a long time, or at least not at the rate that the Government would like now. This is deduced from the words of the leader of the PSC, Salvador Illa in the interview on TV3 with the leader of the opposition, where he proposed a negotiation on the accounts on an equal footing with the Executive of Pere Aragonès.
“We are at the beginning of the beginning” and “as far as I am concerned they will not be adhesion budgets, but serious and orderly negotiation”, through the “sharing of two projects for reunion budgets” warned Illa yesterday .
The socialist leader exhibited the strength that, in his opinion, gives him being the first party in Parliament and having in his hands the approval of budgets that, in the end, would ensure the life of the ERC Government alone until the end of the legislature. In the logic of the socialist leader, there is no possibility that Junts will end up giving his support two months after leaving the Catalan Executive.
This position of strength makes him reject the rush that the Republicans now seem to have after putting the reform of the crime of sedition on track, remembering that it has been offered since August 22 and that until just two days ago he had not received reliable signs from Palau of wanting to a budget agreement with the PSC. “Catalonia will not have budgets on January 1 and the responsibility lies with the president,” Illa remarked.
That it is no longer possible to have accounts in a timely manner is not an obstacle to their approval, but if Aragonès wants to have the votes of PSC-Units, he will have to roll up his sleeves. Illa proposed yesterday to apply a working method that will undoubtedly delay the negotiations. His idea is to create six sectoral working groups (infrastructure, health, social rights, energy transition, industry and rationalization of the administration) in which the corresponding area managers of the alternative socialist government participate. Party sources show that this methodology, with which it is intended to negotiate “issue by issue and not make a mere contribution” to the Government’s budgets, would blow up the approval schedule that ERC has in mind: “We are going to after the holidays”, they admit.
In addition, the opposition leader raised preconditions for negotiations, such as getting projects like the Hard Rock in Tarragona off the ground: “We will not endorse the budgets of a Government that paralyzes projects,” he warned.
Illa said he had reasons to propose an exhaustive and laborious negotiation. On the one hand, the distrust generated by the history of agreements breached by ERC. He recalled that the Republicans have forgotten the pact to create the party table in Catalonia, reached within the framework of the agreement for the investiture of Pedro Sánchez, and the breaches of the commitments with Junts for the investiture of Aragonès. “I want guarantees that it is fulfilled,” he claimed.
But in addition, the socialist leader stressed that the Government is based on “a very small minority in Parliament”, since it only has the support of the 33 republican deputies, the same as the PSC
