Aragonès puts governance to the test after approving the budgets today

Pere Aragonès entered the Palau de la Generalitat almost two years ago driving a car with Junts per Catalunya as co-driver and the CUP in tow.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
10 March 2023 Friday 05:25
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Aragonès puts governance to the test after approving the budgets today

Pere Aragonès entered the Palau de la Generalitat almost two years ago driving a car with Junts per Catalunya as co-driver and the CUP in tow. He lost the drag in the middle of the road in the first of the potholes, with the 2022 budgets, and his travel companion got out of the vehicle in October when he sensed that the highway was not destined for a confrontation with the State . Since then, the president has taken the PSC and the commons in the back seat, but for a short time, only for the 2023 budgets approved today.

From now on, the Government will walk alone. He only has the support of the 33 deputies that ERC has in Parliament and he appears without any stability pact under his arm, also having to assume contradictions in the form of macro-projects: the future of El Prat airport, the Hard Rock and the B- 40. Esquerra had one more surprise after signing the budget agreement with the PSC: the decline in the universal basic income.

The new budgets will not prevent Aragonès from having to apply something that he publicly assumed a few days after Junts broke with the Government: pull variable geometry, go "measure to measure, project by project", to approve each of the initiatives that he intends to carry out just. There is a sanitary cordon to Vox. The PP has also denounced that it is being vetoed, as Alejandro Fernández, president of the PP in Catalonia, has stated. Governance is uncertain, despite the fact that for Salvador Illa, first secretary of the PSC, it is shown that there is "a different policy, a useful policy."

However, they allow the Government for the moment to avoid early elections and face the municipal elections in May with the banner of responsible administration with the citizenry, a quality that has constantly demanded of the formations that make up the parliamentary arc. Just today it has been Marta Vilalta, spokesperson for the Republicans, who has been in charge of it. With the accounts, the Catalan Executive by the way aspires to exhaust the legislature in 2025. "These are the budgets that Mr. Aragonès needs to continue in power," Cs has opined.

Be that as it may, Pere Aragonès and the Minister of Economy, Natàlia Mas, already have the budgets in the bag. Those of 2022 were designed to face the serious consequences of the covid pandemic. Those approved this Friday after months of negotiations are intended to alleviate the considerable increase in inflation, a consequence in large part of the war in Ukraine. But it is probably the drought that brings Pere Aragonès headlong. It has been 29 months since there has been a normal rainfall regime and the prospects are not rosy.

Precisely the PSC and En Comú Podem have gone, the parties that have allowed, together with ERC, the 2023 budgets to go ahead, those who have remembered this "weakness" of the Catalan Executive and the need to accelerate the measures against the drought. Alícia Romero, Socialist deputy, and Joan Carles Gallego, from the commons, have influenced the idea that the Government is "in a delicate and weak situation" and have once again pointed out that their formation does not prop up the Catalan Cabinet. Romero, getting emotional, has attested that the budget negotiation has been "hard, long and not without difficulties" and has urged the Government to urgently use the 700 million that the budget contemplates to face the drought.

There are significant data. The budgets approved this Friday have a record expenditure of 41,000 million euros and are the ones that have obtained the most support in 20 years. There are 73 votes in favor -compared to 58 against- that only the two tripartites of Pasqual Maragall, first, and José Montilla, the four following years, have equaled. In full process, the maximum number of favorable votes harvested was in 2014 and 2015, with 71 yeses from CiU and ERC. Precisely since then that the accounts were not approved two years in a row.

However, unlike those approved for 2022, when Jaume Giró was in charge of the Ministry of Economy, those of today have not been approved in a timely manner, that is, before January 1. Romero, in addition, also left a piece of information to take into account: it had been more than ten years since the PSC had not participated in the negotiation of the Generalitat's accounts.

More. It is the third time in a row that the commons facilitate the approval of some budgets. With an abstention for those of 2020, with Quim Torra as president, and with the same sense of vote for those of 2022, already with Pere Aragonès at the helm. The "slab" of voting with JxCat was too heavy. Today, En Comú Podem, released, has gone one step further and has voted in favor.

Given this, Junts announces the arrival of a new three-way entente. "The wolf that enters the roost: the tripartite", Jordi Munell stated, while lamenting that "autonomy is postponed for another year to the detriment of independence" and that the ERC leader, Gabriel Rufián, was seen "crying in Congress to Sánchez so that they vote on the budgets in Catalonia ”. "In Madrid they are very concerned, and in Catalonia there is a sad independence movement," concluded the leader of the JxCat parliamentary group.

The CUP, for its part, completely repudiates the budgets. Eulàlia Reguant has argued that "whoever claims these budgets is the one who claims that no one changes", both in the social and national spheres.

However, it has been Natàlia Mas who has rejected the block policy. She has done so explicitly, when she has pointed out that it shows that "independence has an unequivocal vocation to reach agreements." In addition, she has summoned post-convergents and Cubans to work together in the future in other areas, "either from my department or from other areas". Variable geometry.