Pere Aragonès doses his purposes on a national scale in each of his Christmas speeches and seems to be convinced that piano, piano, if it goes well; that little by little, it goes away. Namely, by 2022 he demanded to unblock the political conflict through amnesty; By 2023, Catalan entities and political parties will sign a clarity agreement, and this time, with the criminal forgetfulness law almost in the bag, but the clarity agreement still to be defined, calls for beginning to address the “second phase.” A stage that leads to a referendum.
“2024 has to be the year in which we address the second phase of the negotiation process with the State, where Catalonia has to be able to freely decide its future,” the president of the Generalitat said this Tuesday during his Christmas speech.
A negotiation that the Government and ERC put on hold until now to ensure the end of “the repression” and that translated, first, into pardons, and then, into the repeal of the crime of sedition, until finally having the amnesty.
The amnesty law, agreed with the PSOE, does not allow delay, according to Aragonès. It must be fully effective in 2024 to allow “recovering the freedom and return to Catalonia of the people retaliated for their commitment to the [1-O] referendum,” he stated from the King Martí warehouse in Barcelona.
The problem is that the Government of Pedro Sánchez has assured time and again that the self-determination referendum to which the independence movement aspires will never happen. The difficulty is even greater if one takes into account that the proposed clarity agreement does not have any political support. With tweezers, that of the commons, but the pro-independence formations are divided and more concerned about competing in the next elections to the Parliament.
Be that as it may, Pedro Sánchez, in his visit to the Palau de la Generalitat last week, made it clear that a referendum has no place, but he opened up to studying new financing.
Aragonès has claimed it again. The president wants it to be “singular”, specific, with the full capacity of the Catalan treasury to collect all taxes. This, after a face-to-face negotiation between the State and Catalonia. Sánchez, on the other hand, proposes a reform, but in a multilateral manner, with all the autonomous communities involved.
In any case, the president of the Generalitat, although he poses the national aspirations as an eternal ultramarathon in stages, with the financing he adds the turbo. In his speech he placed this issue, not as the beginning of a negotiation, but as an achievement to be concluded before the end of 2024: “It has to be the year in which we agree on unique financing with the State that puts an end to a deficit.” unbearable fiscal that deprives us of allocating the resources that we already pay, but that others manage, to improve healthcare” or “strengthen education.”
A whole year, 2024, for Catalonia to win, he said, “the future” it deserves.
Aragonès dedicated a good part of his speech to highlighting the achievements of ERC and its Government in the negotiations with the PSOE and the Moncloa. The last of them, the transfer of the management of the minimum vital income (IMV), but also of Rodalies. He also boasted of the “lowest unemployment rate in recent years,” of the incorporation of “more teachers, more health personnel, and more police officers than ever.” Or having achieved, as he has stressed, “more audiovisual in Catalan than ever”, a fundamental step, in his opinion, for the promotion of Catalan in the streets, schools or screens.
Aragonès has had time in the seven minutes of his speech to refer to the two issues that are undermining his leadership in the Generalitat: the drought and education. The reservoirs in the internal Catalan basins barely exceed 16% and the emergency phase is about to be declared. The president has indicated that it is the “most intense drought ever recorded” and for which he has proposed “continuing investments in water infrastructure.” Regarding education, after the devastating PISA report, Aragonès has encouraged people to dedicate “even more efforts” and continue working with the educational community.
