Airs of change at the Economic Circle, where the outgoing president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, and the presidential candidate with the most options, Salvador Illa, met yesterday for the first time after the elections. Aragonès said goodbye to the Circle warning that the welfare state in Catalonia is at risk without a new funding model that grants more resources to the community. “Either there is a significant agreement on funding or we won’t be able to pay Catalonia with its eight million inhabitants”, he warned during the opening session of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Circle, which will last until tomorrow.
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 this during the conversation he had with the president of the Cercle, Jaume Guardiola, who praised the gesture that Aragonès had by announcing last week that he was leaving the front line of politics once the new government is formed.
The president of the Circle also wanted to thank the disposition that Aragonès has always shown with the Circle, unlike the discreet relationship established with the two previous presidents, Carles Puigdemont and Quim Torra. Some members remembered that it was passed directly from former president Artur Mas (also present in the room yesterday) to Aragonès.
During the presentation of the conference, Guardiola insisted on demanding “transversality” from the political parties and “getting out of their blocs” to “make an agreement with those who have opposing 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 up the range of possibilities and said that “all the pact options must be explored” in order not to fall into an electoral repeat. He recalled that in the last 14 years there have been six electoral calls. Aragonès declined to comment on possible post-electoral pacts for consistency with his decision to leave the front line of politics.
The mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, also intervened, as is traditional, with a short speech in which he called for the ultra-right to be curbed in the European elections.
This year’s edition of the conference is entitled “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 continued low productivity, although he was not so catastrophic. Aragonès vindicated himself and praised the milestones achieved in economic matters, beyond productivity. “We leave 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 everything “with more 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 emphasized 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 and Chery. In terms of innovation, the president highlighted Astrazeneca’s commitment to Barcelona.
Specifically on productivity, Aragonès recognized that there is room for improvement after the economy has undergone a process of “tertiarization” in recent years with the rise of highly labor-intensive sectors. First, construction, and then tourism and trade. That is why he regretted that the non-approval of the budgets has left some 1,000 million euros destined for innovation undistributed.