The harsh drought that Catalonia is experiencing and the degradation of Parliament as a result of the interim presidency due to the Borrà s case are the two issues that monopolize Catalan political news, a few weeks before the municipal elections, and that will gain strength until then, as except in Parliament. The two issues will reach the plenary session next week, the last one to be held before the 28-M elections, with the parties putting all the meat on the spit. On the first issue, the initiative by Junts, which introduced a drought bill last week, may make possible the deal that foundered at last month’s Palau water summit.
The drought will be a core issue of the next plenary session, in which the proposal for extraordinary and urgent measures registered by Junts per Catalunya will be debated. The post-convergent formation requested that it be processed by single reading and the norm, which will be debated and voted on in just a few hours next Thursday, May 4, will supersede the Government’s decree law, so ERC and PSC have already begun to take positions with the mediation of the post-convergents, and the sensations are not bad.
At the center of this debate is the sanctioning regime for city councils. Junts proposes, as it did at the water summit held in Palau at the end of last month, to extend the fines for non-compliant municipalities until July 1. The PSC, which presented an amendment to the entire Government decree with an alternative text in which they bet on completely eliminating the sanctioning regime, only accepted a moratorium at the summit until after the summer, but now they are willing to “cede” with a different formula, avoiding dates and reflecting the need for municipalities “that show a willingness to collaborate” not to be penalized.
Junts has met with the PSC to negotiate on this matter and socialist sources admit that the post-convergents see the solution they are proposing as good. Now, the PSC has yet to submit to Junts a drafting proposal on the sanctioning regime in the line of shifting the focus of the fines of the municipalities that are in a position to tackle their infrastructural problems with water.
ERC is also in a position to accept the leading role that Junts takes on in this matter after the failure of the Palau summit, as well as the recipes that training proposes in its proposed law, which were basically assumed in the summit by the president, Pere Aragonès, but not by the leader of the socialists, Salvador Illa. Government and Junts have also held a meeting to bring positions closer from which the representatives of the Catalan Executive have left “with good feelings”. According to Government spokesperson PatrÃcia Plaja, “an agreement should not be difficult”, since the bulk of the measures in the decree coincide with the proposals that have been transferred.
But the electoral campaign is very close, so it is difficult to venture the final outcome of the debate around the drought. In fact, each group has struggled in recent hours to put formulas on the table to raise the category of the discussion. The Socialists proposed yesterday to move the matter from the Parliament by convening a panel of experts “to be able to talk about such an important issue as the drought in Catalonia”, instead of the academic council that the Government has launched to address the agreement of clarity. And En Comú Podem has proposed this Tuesday that a monographic plenary session be held in the Catalan Chamber.
According to the president of the commons in Parliament, Jéssica Albiach, the issue is important enough to hold this debate and not shelve it “in an hour”, debating the Junts bill. In fact, Albiach has criticized this initiative and the “clamp between Junts and PSC, who want a free bar of water so that their mayors can campaign”, she has said, and which she suspects that ERC may join. “It does not stop being one more electoral elementâ€, she has lamented.
The other matter that will end up in the plenary session of the Parliament next week is the reform of the regulations of the Catalan Chamber of the PSC, which would allow a sort of motion of censure to be introduced to the members of the Table, the governing body of the Parliament, with which could vote for the dismissal of Laura Borràs as president, although she would not lose the seat.
Along with this reform, that of the ERC and the CUP will be debated and voted on, aimed at curbing Vox’s “hate speech” in the Catalan Chamber, and expanding the voting options of deputies: more cases of delegation and incorporating into the regulation of telematic voting in exceptional situations. This tool would be useful for cases such as that of the Junts deputy LluÃs Puig.
