Artur Mas, masism, we should say, is back. The original, not the evolved Pokémon that gave out hugs to the Cuparians. Catalan chambers of commerce, employers and economic lobbies starred on Tuesday in their particular Return to Brideshead, Evelyn Waugh’s best novel. The story of an English army captain who returns to the ruins of an aristocratic mansion where he spent part of his youth and remembers with nostalgic longing a time already consumed.
The electoral offer with which CiU won the elections in 2010 returns with honors today. It’s been a decade and a half since he caught that flame. And it burned so fast that it ended up burning the curtains and the whole floor. Artur Mas himself recalls this in the book Cap fred, cor calent (Columna, 2020), where he recalls the meetings with Mariano Rajoy and the final knock on the door to the singular treatment of Catalan financing. Fourteen years later, economic and business organizations are trying to return to the same point. Three times from goose to goose but backwards: pardons, amnesty and tax pact. From 2024 to 2010.
Making the past the present. The signatories of the document are working on this and also, although with a smaller mouth, ERC and Junts. In the case of the republicans, the investiture agreement with the PSOE provides for the establishment in the first quarter of this year (for now silent) of a bilateral State-Generalitat commission to address the issue of money. For their part, the councilors and the socialists have also set this priority in their negotiations. Leaving Lofca and ceding 100% of taxes is Carles Puigdemont’s letter to kings.
So in the ruins of the Brideshead of massism there is not a single soul. The entire business community and the two big parties of sovereignty convinced that they want to live between those walls again: money, money, money. The past as prologue and fourteen years in the middle walking in circles. Beyond the nationalists, the PSOE itself included in its electoral program of 23-J a new financing system for 2024 and in its government agreement with Sumar it also committed, but without dates, that this legislature would solve the economic problems of the autonomous communities.
That much matching should serve to shuffle the board. Especially when the autonomic financing system has been out of date for ten years and survives thanks to the exercise of misunderstood charity by the Central Administration, based on donations that are activated when the economic suffocation of some communities, among the which the Catalan, their purple skin returns.
But the reasons for optimism, no matter how many employer statements and investiture agreements we gather, are limited. Question of priorities. The silver bullets with which sovereignty has counted twice in a row have been used on other targets. The ERC in the last legislature pointed to pardons. And the current one, fired at the same time by Republicans and Juntaires, about the amnesty. The big game season at the end of Sanchista’s third mandate, in sovereignist terms, has ended. Now it’s small game. And the fiscal pact or federalized finances are a more difficult bear to bring down than the amnesty itself.
There are, however, those who see the wilderness of socialist territorial power as an opportunity for Pedro Sánchez to let himself go on the issue of financing. The argument is that it cannot revolt the autonomous socialist governments because they have ceased to exist. It is certainly a willful view, since a funding model that benefits Catalonia to the detriment of other communities will leave the discomfort caused by the penal oblivion law as child’s play. The amnesty makes a lot of people feel bad, it’s true; but it must not be forgotten that it has the advantage of being free for the pockets of the rest of Spain. So more silver bullets will be needed. And of these only one is distributed, as long as luck is with you, per legislature. It is known now and it was known in 2010. Back to Brideshead. A great novel.
