On the day that the Spanish Government agreed with ERC to forgive 20% of the Catalan debt with the Regional Liquidity Fund (FLA) as one of the agreements for the investiture, the barons of the PP came out to the charge as if they were the troops Napoleonics from Ridley Scott’s latest film. The first to come out in a storm and with their swords raised were the Valencian Carlos Mazón (“creates an unfair division between communities”), the extremist María Guardiola (“grant privileges incompatible with the Constitution”) and the Castilian-Leonese Alfonso Fernández Mañueco (“we will go to court”). María Jesús Montero, the head of the Treasury, did not have time to clarify that all the autonomous communities could benefit from the measure. So there was no injustice, no privileges, no sense in going to court.
But there is always an argument to complain in the age of confrontation in which we are installed. And then it was felt that the central government must have agreed to this measure at the meeting of regional presidents or that the removal was a way to whitewash the agreement with the pro-independence parties. The political scientist Christian Salmon already wrote that, in order to conquer power, the winning combination is to confront, transgress, be unpredictable and impose one’s own truth.
However, the days have gone by and the regional presidents have started to make calculations about what belongs to them. Debt forgiveness divides the PP, as the regional barons are now in favor of the write-off. Only the president of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, is fighting the war on her own account because she is not accumulating loans from the FLA, but debt with the banks, and she is allowed to proclaim that this bailout is “distributing misery”. Misery? According to Fedea, it will reduce the regional debt by 88,000 million. Ayuso has a concept of misery that he should develop more widely.
The Spanish Government has created a mess for the PP without having to take to the streets with flags. And the fact is that the portfolio is flying higher and higher than any banner.
