If there is no unexpected outcome, an improbable last-minute twist of the script, the Government will see how Parliament returns the 2024 budgets that it approved a couple of weeks ago. They would be the second Catalan accounts to fall in history since the democratic restoration. The first setback was in 2016, with Carles Puigdemont as president, Oriol Junqueras as vice-president, and the current head of the Catalan Executive, Pere Aragonès, as Secretary General of Economy.
History can therefore be repeated today, if the disagreement between the Government and En Comú Podemos is consummated with the tourism and leisure macro project projected in Tarragona, the Hard Rock. The president and the leader of the commons, Jéssica Albiach, met yesterday afternoon in Palau for about 45 minutes and there was no way to find an agreement.
The Government insists that there is no scope for discarding the urban master plan (PDU) of the Hard Rock, which would give life to a project stuck for a decade, and the commons demanded from the president a public statement “that the Hard Rock will not be will do”, something that would make Aragonès lose the support of Salvador Illa’s PSC, the only party with which he has reached an agreement to save the accounts. The shock is total and leaves Catalan budgets one step away from wreckage.
Not even the pressure maneuvers that have been carried out in the last few hours have softened either side. The Government has used its influence in Madrid to ensure that, through Moncloa, the commons reach an agreement, without ruling out Hard Rock, of course. And the commons have asserted their autonomy with respect to Sumar and Yolanda Díaz and have described ERC as a “subaltern party to the PSC”.
At the meeting between Aragonès and Albiach there was no room for agreement. Albiach went to Palau after reporting in the media that he had not spoken to the president for weeks, but the phrase he heard most from his interlocutor was, according to sources in his party, “the PSC does not accept this”.
In the more technical content of the negotiations, they do not appreciate that there have been major advances either. “They don’t accept the sixth hour in education, nor the money for housing…” (1,000 million and a specific regulation for seasonal rentals). When leaving Palau, the commons left with the feeling that ERC “is trapped by the PSC”, and that the multiple pacts linked with the socialists, also with the central government, have reduced the room for maneuver to a minimum Aragonese
The feeling in the Government is that the commons, “and particularly Albiach”, have decided their position “whatever the offer they receive”. “Possibly with Ada Colau behind”, they add. All in all, the Republicans are not throwing in the towel, but they have assumed that the solution requires almost exclusively – and even now – the intervention of Sumar, from Madrid.
Be that as it may, the situation is delicate for the Left and the electoral advance is an option that the Government does not want to study until today’s debate in the Parliament of .
