TV3 and Catalunya Radio (now 3Cat) have organized, this Tuesday, May 7, the last electoral debate of the May 12 campaign. Moderated by Ariadna Oltra, it has brought together the heads of the list for Barcelona – with the exception of ex-president Carles Puigdemont -: Salvador Illa (PSC), Pere Aragonès (ERC), Josep Rull (Junts), Ignacio Garriga (Vox), Laia Estrada ( CUP), Jéssica Albiach (Comuns Sumar), Carlos Carrizosa (Cs) and Alejandro Fernández (PP). These are the fact-checks of the Verificat team, whose methodology can be consulted here.
The candidate for re-election of ERC and president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, has stated that since 2021, during his mandate, the resources that come from regenerated water have multiplied “by eight”, going from “10 to 80 hectometres”. cubic (hm³).”
But this statement is false. Water regeneration has not multiplied by eight, but has doubled during the last legislature, going from 39.29 hm³, in 2020, to 81.64 hm³ in 2023. In fact, since 2005, when the series of data from the Catalan Water Agency (ACA) in this regard, the volume has not fallen below 20 hm³.
Jéssica Albiach, number 1 for Barcelona of Comuns Sumar, has denounced that, if the Hard Rock macroproject goes ahead, it would consume as much water “as a city of 30,000 inhabitants.”
How does the Commons perform this calculation? Through the figure offered by the Barcelona Hoteliers Guild, which estimates the daily water consumption of luxury tourists in the Catalan capital up to 242 liters per person per day, as confirmed by the press department of the match to Verificat. Therefore, according to this estimate, the daily water consumption of a population of 30,000 inhabitants would be 7,260,000 liters.
However, if the calculation were made based on the average water consumption per inhabitant per day in Catalonia, which is 124 liters, according to the National Institute of Statistics (INE), a city of these dimensions would consume 3,720,000 liters of water. up to date. The figure would exceed the water consumption forecast that the Urban Director Plan has initially contemplated for the Hard Rock: 2,948,729 l/day.
Ignacio Garriga and Alejandro Fernández, heads of the Vox and PP lists, respectively, have valued the interconnection of hydrographic basins to solve the “dramatic problem” that Catalonia is suffering, in reference to the drought. A topic that has focused the first block of the debate on Catalan public television.
Although it is true that four professional associations – that of economists, and those of industrial engineers, civil engineers and agronomists – are in favor of this route, as the popular candidate has indicated, the interconnection of the Ebro basin with the internal It is opposed by the Intercol·legial Terres de l’Ebre, which includes seven local entities.
Verificat has consulted with various experts on this issue, repeated on several occasions during the campaign by both parties, and they assure that it is not a priority. They point out that the first step should be to reduce water consumption and advocate for other methods, such as regeneration, desalination or the use of rain. There are academics, also asked about Verificat, who even rule out the option due to its environmental and social impact.
“We are where we were 10 years ago,” exclaimed the PSC candidate, Salvador Illa, who lamented that Catalonia “is behind” in the installation of renewable energies in Spain. An accusation that the ERC candidate has denied. But what is the correct answer?
Well, it depends on the indicator. In terms of energy generated, to which Illa was referring, Catalonia is at the bottom with 15% of the energy coming from renewable sources, only ahead of the Balearic Islands, with a percentage that stands at 11.5%. . Catalonia is also the fifth autonomous community that has installed the fewest wind and photovoltaic installations in the last five years.
The Republican has denied the greatest, referring to the installed power, in which Catalonia is placed in seventh position. The same happens with green energy produced in 2022.
The head of the Ciutadans list, Carlos Carrizosa, has assured that “linguistic immersion goes so far as to monitor, through networks of reporters, whether children speak Catalan in the playground.” The statement, which is based on a sociolinguistic study by Plataforma per la Llengua, is misleading.
The research that Carrizosa cites sought to “empirically verify” the reduction in the use of Catalan as a language of relationships among young people, but it was based on a non-participant observation methodology. That is, the information was collected through mere observation and without interacting with the students, the object of study.
In fact, during the municipal election campaign in Barcelona last year, another orange party candidate, Anna Grau, referred to this study and described it as “espionage.” The party reported the report to the Spanish Data Protection Agency, which archived it.
In the public policy block, the head of the Vox list has indicated that social benefits are granted to “irregular immigrants” and that they are denied to the citizenship of Catalonia. But this is false.
The only basic social aid that migrants in an irregular situation have access to are health and education. The Guaranteed Citizenship Income (RGC) or the Minimum Living Income (IMV), for example, are not available to you.
In terms of housing, according to data obtained by Verificat from the Catalan Habitat Agency (ACH), 76% of those managed and 65% of those awarded by said institution, respectively, correspond to citizens of Spanish nationality. Officially subsidized housing is assigned in Catalonia according to economic criteria (income) and housing need, among others, not by nationality, as the Vox candidate claims.
The candidate of Vox and the number 3 for Barcelona of Junts, Josep Rull, have been involved in a scuffle about crime after the former has linked the “growing crime” with “Islamist” immigration. Rull, for his part, has denied this relationship.
And it is false that there is any correlation between immigration and crime, as Verificat has already explained on several occasions. There is an overrepresentation of foreigners in the statistics of arrests and convictions: according to data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE) and the Ministry of the Interior, while of the total number of foreigners detained, only 39.1% are convicted, in the case Of the detained Spaniards this percentage grows to 60%.
On the one hand, it is true that there has been a significant increase in the foreign population, from 2.9% in 2000 to 17.2% in 2023. However, this increase has not been linked to an increase in the crime rate. It should be noted that crime is multi-causal and that there are studies that affirm that the “probability that an immigrant with good job opportunities will be a criminal is no greater than that of a native under the same conditions.”
On the other hand, it is not true that immigrants reoffend more than people with Spanish nationality. According to data from the Center for Legal Studies and Specialized Training (CEJFE) from 2020 on those released from prison in Spain, 20.4% of Spaniards returned to prison, while, in the case of foreigners, the rate was of 22.2%.
Still in terms of security and crime, Garriga has pointed out that women are today “more unsafe” on the streets of Catalonia, in reference to the increase in rapes. It’s misleading.
Although it is true that complaints for this type of crime have increased and, consequently, sexual assaults have also increased, a greater number of complaints does not mean more cases of gender violence. “This evolution of data could be showing the effect of greater identification by women of situations of gender violence, of greater recognition by society of victims of gender violence and, in general terms, of greater social sensitivity to the phenomenon”, as stated in a 2021 study published in the Spanish Journal of Sociological Research.
Likewise, the report points out that “it is observed that the evolution is not uniform, but, as of 2010, there is a downward trend” in the evolution of fatalities in Spain, as supported by the data from the Government Delegation, also in Catalonia.
