There is a certain air of optimism in the noble plants of the big Catalan companies after the speech of former president Carles Puigdemont on Tuesday in Brussels. The bosses make a pragmatic reading of the words of the Junts leader and distance themselves from the literal interpretations that are tenaciously applied to the media and politics in Madrid.
Optimism for several reasons. Puigdemont has maintained the script he advanced to the president of Foment, Josep Sánchez Llibre, when the two met in Brussels in May and also in subsequent talks. This was summed up in the willingness to negotiate with the candidate with the possibility of forming a government after the elections of 23-J, in this case Pedro Sánchez, discarding the idea that pro-independence people were tempted by the idea that the worse, the better; emphasis on the demand for amnesty for those retaliated against in the process; interest in the return of Catalan companies that moved their headquarters outside Catalonia in 2017, and to avoid concrete demands on a self-determination referendum (La Vanguardia of July 30 and August 6). They consider that on Tuesday Puigdemont made this openness to dialogue with the PSOE clear and that the first test was the agreement on the Congress Bureau and the pact for the use of the co-official languages ??in this institution.
Regarding corporate headquarters, the former president made explicit reference to the issue in his parliament. But in a way that sought to minimize the reproach to the businessmen – who at the time of the events were described as traitors – to place the case in the context of the criticism of the “systematic suffocation of the Catalan economy” by the State, “a painful example of which is the strategy of changing business headquarters encouraged by a royal decree of urgent measures approved by the central government (of Mariano Rajoy) and which is still in force”.
A clear nod to the patterns of the economy. As is well known, Catalan business organizations have a great interest in encouraging the return of these companies, which is necessary to regain the role of leading economy in Spain (a position they are not renouncing), but they consider that it will only be possible as a result of ‘a great political agreement between Madrid and Barcelona, ??which guarantees political stability and rules out unilateral measures. And they think they see that the first steps can now be taken for a major agreement that will change the state of Catalonia’s relations with the rest of Spain, the fit, a concept that has caused so many headaches for the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo.
third On Tuesday, the now European parliamentarian did not forget to include a program of economic demands that partly coincide with the aspirations of the barons of the economy, with some discrepancy, but of less scope. He recalled that there is “a fiscal deficit of more than 20,000 million per year. Something as basic to people’s lives as trains does not work. (…) We don’t train enough doctors and we can’t pay them what they deserve. Our minimum wage is unfair considering the cost of living. Young people cannot access housing… The Government does not execute the budgets”.
A classic tug-of-war of demands that are part of the business vademecum and in which the bourgeoisie feels much more comfortable, as it already made clear in a premonitory way in the first debates on the reform of the Statute. New gesture towards employers, certainly not only the big ones; also towards the little ones represented by Mònica Roca, the president of the Chamber.
Based on these words, some conspicuous members of Barcelona’s reduced upper bourgeoisie are already speaking these days with emphasis, and perhaps excessive haste, of a new political scenario in Catalonia in which Puigdemont and Junts would be writing the first pages of a renaissance Neo-Pujolian convergence, adapted to the world of the 21st century and the political consequences of the post-process. The growing understanding of Jaume Collboni, the new socialist mayor of Barcelona, ??with the Junts candidate, Xavier Trias, also feeds this vision.
But this optimism also has buts. Firstly, Puigdemont’s proposal is formulated in terms that are “very harsh and unsympathetic to the rest of Spain”, according to the point of view of some big businessmen, who also believe that “this way it is very difficult to sustain negotiations that they can last quite some time”. And according to his opinion, the leader of Junts proposes that “only the other side takes the blame for the events, a bit politically complex”. They hope that as the days go by, realism will become more important in the public interventions of Junts leaders. It should not be forgotten that the position of the economic elites is always ambivalent and there is no unanimity: they mostly voted for the PP in the general and Trias, not Junts, in the municipal ones and now they want to underpin an agreement between the socialists and the independentists The euphemism that summarizes this contradiction is that of pragmatism.
For the Catalan bourgeoisie, however, this is only one side of the problem. Another of equal importance is that his point of view is not shared by the rest of the entrepreneurs in Spain. Nor in the CEOE chaired by Antonio Garamendi, as in the rest of the business organizations. The economic world considers that an amnesty and other possible agreements on the reform of the political structure weaken the State and introduce legal insecurity, in addition to projecting a negative image of the country abroad.
The PP is obviously included in this rejection front and the businessmen believe that, without Feijóo’s party being incorporated into the new political consensus at some point, the pressure for the negotiations to fail may end up being unbearable. Does the Catalan bourgeoisie have the capacity to influence these variables and improve the atmosphere towards a new political consensus on the solution to the Catalan question?
