The Catalan economic world has lived the last few weeks with the certainty that a new period of coalition government was opening between the PSOE and Sumar, with the support of Catalan and Basque nationalism. This week the socialist Pedro Sánchez will be sworn in again as president, a scenario that the centers of economic power in Barcelona have considered as the lesser evil after the complex result of the July 23 elections. And to a certain extent they have provided a preferable alternative to a new electoral call that could have opened a period of greater political instability in Catalonia.
During these months of negotiations for the investiture, like a guadiana, with public and confidential phases alternating, the Catalan economic world has certainly been very present.
Last Monday, three days before the announcement of the final agreement between Sánchez's socialists and Carles Puigdemont's independentists, Foment's board of directors, made up of more than eighty people, discussed and approved a document titled Proposals for measures for the productive economy , presented by its president, Josep Sánchez Llibre.
The document is a compendium of the main demands for the new political phase, most of which are already known. It begins with taxation, its great workhorse ––especially against wealth taxes and the temporary solidarity of large fortunes––and continues with the demands for more execution of public investment, especially in Catalonia.
It also emphasizes the urgency of launching the expansion of the El Prat airport, as well as its interconnection, through the AVE, with the Reus and Girona aerodromes. It includes the infrastructure construction program to address the regular droughts that plague the Community and especially the metropolitan area of Barcelona.
In addition to singing the praises of social dialogue, which they consider an alternative to the Government's unilateral measures, such as the announcement of the reduction of the working day to 37.5 hours included in the PSOE-Sumar pact, it advocates a reindustrialization in the face of the evident loss of economic weight of that sector in the Catalan and Spanish economy.
At that same meeting, the board of business leaders agreed to send this proposed measure to Junts, Puigdemont's party; also to the CEOE, the large Spanish business organization chaired by Antonio Garamendi and of which Foment is a part.
The objective of these movements is to end up forming an alternative pole in the field of economic policy within the new majority that the Sánchez Government will need and that compensates for the economic proposals of its partner Sumar, a group led by the current Minister of Labor. , Yolanda Díaz.
And in that compensatory axis should be Junts and the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), two formations with which conservative businessmen feel comfortable and with which they largely share their vision of economic policy. And with those who have experienced glorious episodes in the past, when on the Catalan side the party was the CiU of the times of former president Jordi Pujol and for a short period of time his pupil Artur Mas.
The reaction in Spain to the pact between the Socialists and Junts has raised enormous concern in the Catalan economic elite, who fear a return of the hostile atmosphere towards business. As experienced in other times, such as the drafting of the Statute or various stages of the process.
