The Government and the parliamentary group of the PSC have reached an agreement to approve the Generalitat's budgets after three months of arduous negotiations, as announced by the Catalan Executive early this morning. In parallel, both parties have reached another agreement on the large infrastructures of the country that the PSC claimed as a sine qua non condition, which includes the unlocking of the fourth belt or B-40.
Specifically, this second agreement is committed to making effective, within the first quarter of 2023, with the Ministry of Transport the agreement and financing agreement that guarantees the drafting of the Ronda Norte (B-40) project and the execution of the works by the Generalitat. This is the key to the agreement, after ERC gave in last week and promised to carry out that path, voting in favor of a parliamentary motion of the PSC in that regard.
This decision has served as an accelerator to unravel negotiations that were on the way to collapse. As a result of that "relevant gesture" of the Republicans -according to the socialist leader Salvador Illa- the thing has been a matter of hours and closing some pending "fringes".
Regarding the other two main demands of the PSC, the expansion of the El Prat airport and the Hard Rock project, the agreement is more ambiguous and does not change things much from how they are now. It is committed to the reindustrialization of the Tarragona countryside, the Hard Rock project follows the ordinary procedure that was already underway, while the emphasis is placed on the management and improvement of the airport to become an international hub with respect for biodiversity and not in the expansion of Aena, which does not appear in the text.
In relation to the accounts, the agreement reached establishes increasing the weight of primary care in the budget allocated to the provision of health services, up to 24%, through the provision of 2,100 million euros for this area. This represents an increase of four points with respect to what was agreed between the Government and the commons and, according to the text, it should serve to focus efforts on organizational elements that are priorities for Primary Care.
In any case, the pact will allow the Executive of Pere Aragonès to approve the accounts in an Executive Council and immediately begin the processing of the bill in Parliament. This procedure, which is estimated to still last about 45 days until its final approval, will begin with the informative sessions of the Government's ministers in the respective parliamentary commissions, where the new items will be reported by departments.
Except for unforeseen and unforeseeable scenarios, the agreement will make it possible to avoid an electoral advance in Catalonia, opening up the possibility that the Government practically exhausts the legislature. This situation shows the importance of a pact that, moreover, comes four months before the municipal elections and that can be considered the first major agreement for governance between an independentist party and a constitutionalist party after the years of the process.
The agreement between the Government and PSC for the accounts definitively breaks the blocks installed in Catalonia in recent years (independence vs. non-independence). And in the pragmatic field it will allow us to have 3,800 million euros more in spending for this year. The 2023 budget will therefore be almost 33,800 million euros, 10.7% more than in 2022, and in the absence of specifications on the part of the contracting parties, it will enable Catalonia to resume some of the investment projects that remained blocked, such as the mentioned B-40, the extension of the El Prat airport and the Hard Rock.
The PSC explicitly demanded the written commitment of the Government for the execution of said infrastructures, despite the fact that the Republican Executive has tried to circumvent this commitment in the negotiations. The execution of these projects have been the sine qua non condition imposed by Illa, to the point of leaving no room for ERC if he wanted to have the support of the PSC for the budgets.
After weeks of negotiations in which the PSC has counted some 25 meetings, the positions really began to get closer when ERC agreed to take on the construction of the section of the B-40 with great regret. The Government had been pointing out for days that the differences on this road were the only stumbling block for the agreement with the Socialists, and after this transfer both parties have continued to close "non-minor fringes", according to the PSC, until closing the pact.
The meetings of the last hours between both parties have served to review the previously agreed, which was quite a lot, and to close the "last fringes" that were pending this Monday.
