Pere Aragonès has closed an agreement with the PSC for the 2024 budgets, but at the same time has started the countdown to reach another agreement with the commons. On March 13, time runs out. It will be then that the plenary session of the Parliament will debate whether the budgets, whose preliminary draft will be approved today by the Government in an extraordinary Executive Council, are still alive and can be definitively endorsed in mid-April. Where I said I say, I say Diego: until yesterday Aragonès had promised not to process the accounts until obtaining the necessary support.
Their objective is to put pressure on En Comú Podem. But if the Catalan Executive does not manage to agree on even a minimum with the commons before that date, the “goal ball” with which Salvador Illa claims to assist Pere Aragonès will hit the post and the Government will be on the verge of approving the third consecutive budgets.
It is essential that a third group of the Parliament, in addition to ERC and the PSC, facilitate the budgets of the Generalitat, which amount to a total of 43.6 billion euros. “The tallest and most social in history,” the vice president of the Government, Laura Vilagrà, was quick to recall yesterday first thing in the morning, as a bait for the commoners. The handshake between Aragonès and Illa yesterday afternoon at the Palau de la Generalitat is not enough.
Jéssica Albiach's people frown. If for the 2023 accounts the role of tough for negotiation was reserved for the PSC, this year the tables have turned and it is En Comú Podem who has renounced the agreement before anyone else and who warns that withdrawing the urban master plan of the Hard Rock “It is an essential condition to start negotiating.”
The Government is between a rock and a hard place. The Hard Rock has the favor of the PSC, but the commoners reject it. They do not share the economic model and reject the environmental impact.
Yesterday Illa justified her support for the budgets. For the leader of the PSC, it is enough that Aragonès assured in the plenary session of the Parliament last week that the processing of this recreational complex, in Tarragona, will continue. This issue is part of the “substantial part” of what was signed last year within the framework of the talks on the 2023 budgets, which Illa admitted that the Government is complying with. The other two are the improvement of the B-40 road link between Terrassa and Sabadell and the commission for “the transformation” of the El Prat airport.
Aware that his agreement with the Government “is not enough” and of the position of the commons, Illa launched “a call to all groups”, out of respect for everyone and the decisions they must make, “so that they are at the same level height". In fact, he stressed that he would like to have the support of both the common people and Junts: “Welcome. “I would like them both to be there because I think the moment requires broad support.”
But Junts took charge hours later of reviling the pact. For the post-convergent spokesperson in the Parliament, Mònica Sales, the “exchange of stickers” was evident from the moment when, a few days ago, it was announced that PSC and Esquerra had agreed on the accounts of Barcelona City Council. It was “the prelude” to the Government-PSC agreement in the Generalitat, Sales deduced.
Attracting Junts to the agreement for the Generalitat's budgets is an almost impossible mission. The post-convergents have met only three times with the Government, while the PSC, as Illa revealed yesterday, have held fifteen meetings, not counting the informal contacts between the socialist leader and the president, the last one, at Sunday dinner at the Mobile World Congress.
The negotiation between the Government and PSC has been much more discreet than last year, without noise and keeping in mind the commitment to mutual support that Pedro Sánchez and Aragonès acquired during the talks for the re-election of the socialist leader as president of the Spanish Government.
The commons, unlike when Ada Colau governed in Barcelona, no longer have the incentive of an exchange of stickers, although they share the State Government with the PSOE, so there is still a lot to rain.
The Government avoids stating that the decision to approve the draft in today's Executive Council is a measure of pressure on the commons. Patrícia Plaja, spokesperson for the Catalan Cabinet, was overflowing with optimism, assuring that the Republicans are in a position to garner the support of “more than three parliamentary groups.”
The Catalan Executive is convinced that the commons cannot reject “the most social budgets in history.” Furthermore, they remember that there is no item for Hard Rock in them, nor a single reference to this project in the 17 pages that describe the pact with the PSC. “If the common people do not want to approve these budgets, so expansive and so social, they will have to explain very well why,” Plaja warned before admitting that the Hard Rock does not fit with the ERC “country model.”
The spokesperson stated that the Government would now oppose creating the project, but stressed that it “can no longer stop” the processing of the project.
Although Albiach assured yesterday that “we are where we were”, his group meets tomorrow with the Government. It will be the first face-to-face contact after the pact with the PSC.
