The president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, began his second official trip to Brussels this Tuesday, where two days of meetings with four European commissioners awaited him, in addition to a conference at the European Parliament, an agenda very similar to that of his predecessors. before the process destroyed the privileged dialogue that Catalonia has traditionally maintained with the institutions of the European Union. It is the main message that Aragonès highlighted from his visit to the community capital, from where he did not lose sight of the movements around the amnesty law proposal.
The full agenda of meetings of this visit reflects the “culmination” of the “recovery of the full dialogue of the Generalitat with the European Commission that we began under my presidency,” highlighted the president, after meeting with the European Commissioner for Economy, Paolo Gentiloni. accompanied by the Minister of Finance, Natàlia.
In the afternoon, Aragonés and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Meritxell Serret, met with the vice-president of the Commission and responsible for Democracy and Demography, Dubravka Šuica, as well as with the commissioner responsible for Cohesion, Elisa Ferreira. The executive vice-president of the institution, Maroš Šefčovič, is waiting for them today.
“The political prevention that may have existed before has now disappeared. There is a direct and very positive dialogue with the Commission,” celebrate Government sources, who recall that the normalization of contacts with Brussels was one of the objectives that Aragonès set for himself when he arrived at the Palau de la Generalitat almost three years ago. Then he found that the doors of the European Commission had been firmly closed to the Catalan authorities since 2015, when the independence process began to advance steps in its fight against the State.
In total, the Generalitat raises to 14 the “high-level” meetings held with 10 members of the European Commission since the beginning of Aragonès' mandate. The visit of the president of the community executive, Ursula von der Leyen, to Barcelona in May 2022 to receive an award from the Cercle d'Economia led to a formal meeting, in the presence of President Pedro Sánchez, which made it clear that the thaw between Brussels and the Generalitat had started and had the approval of Moncloa. Two months later, the vice president of the European Commission, Margaritis Schinas, a member of the European People's Party and a person very close to the PP, visited Barcelona and passed through the doors of the Palau to meet with the president and leader of ERC. In October of that year, it was Aragonès himself who traveled to Brussels. The doors of the Berlaymont, the headquarters of the community executive, were opened after seven years for the president of the Generalitat. Also at the level of councilors there have been several meetings with commissioners.
“Today Catalonia is once again present in the European Commission and therefore the interests of its citizens are well represented,” Aragonés stressed in statements to the press on the sidelines of his visit. “Today we once again demonstrate the capacity of the Government of the Generalitat to recover maximum dialogue with the European institutions” and exercise “Catalonia's will to get involved and contribute” to European debates, stressed Minister Serret, part of the group that was installed with Carles Puigdemont in Brussels. Serret as the Government's delegate to the EU between 2018 and 2021, the year in which she returned to Spain to face her judicial situation, she personally experienced the seven-year drought of institutional contacts.
Aragonès sent several messages to the European authorities. On the one hand, he defended the attractiveness of different industrial projects in Catalonia for Next Generation EU funds, but he also conveyed complaints about their distribution in Spain. “When they are managed with competitive calls, where what is valued is capacity and talent, we have good results,” while “when there are political decisions, we find a recentralization of funds that does not help development.” fully,” he criticized.
It is a common lament of European regions, whose role in this important item of financing is much smaller than in the case of other community funds, such as cohesion aid. However, for the Minister of Economy and Hisenda, “this is not the case in other European territories.” Aragonès also spoke with Gentiloni about the new fiscal rules and regretted that they do not take into account situations such as those of Catalonia, regions with broad powers and an obligation to provide services to citizens. “It is essential that this multilevel governance be taken into account,” he claimed.
In addition to meeting with Šefčovič, Aragonés will participate today in a conference on the right to self-determination in which the Basque Lehendakari, Íñigo Urkullu, and the president of the Executive Council of Corsica, Gilles Simeoni, will also speak. The objective is to promote an initiative so that the EU has legislation that recognizes this right.
Although Aragonès will visit the European Parliament, no meeting with Puigdemont is planned. The intense agenda of meetings has made it impossible, justify Government sources.
