Jaume Guardiola: "These elections will be more polarized than ever"

Jaume Guardiola (Barcelona, ​​1957), president of the Cercle d'Economia, exultantly attended this newspaper last Wednesday in an already empty W hotel after one of the most moved annual meetings of this entity in recent years due to the political situation.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
02 June 2023 Friday 22:21
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Jaume Guardiola: "These elections will be more polarized than ever"

Jaume Guardiola (Barcelona, ​​1957), president of the Cercle d'Economia, exultantly attended this newspaper last Wednesday in an already empty W hotel after one of the most moved annual meetings of this entity in recent years due to the political situation. The result has been good, he underlines, despite the sudden absence of the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez.

What balance does it make?

In the end, the balance of the meeting has to be done by the partners and attendees. But from what I have been capturing, I think that everyone is happy. We have touched on deep issues, such as geopolitics, which help us understand where we are and where we are going.

Has politics played a trick on you?

We have had the commotion of the political agenda, which was already complicated by the fact of having the elections the previous Sunday and which changed the natural order of the interventions. To this was added the news on Monday of the electoral advance, which has led us to this last minute change: the President of the Government could not come and has been replaced by Vice President Nadia Calviño. I think it was important to make an Opinion Note with impact, because that has marked the debate.

And that this year the Cercle wanted fewer politicians...

At other times many more ministers have attended and this time the basic pieces have come, as designed. What happens is that the situation has made the meeting very central politically, but it has been in the corridors and in the interventions of politicians. The tables have been very focused on the planned topics and I think that the partners have taken a good reflection on the moment of the world.

The phrase of the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, against the wealth tax, has been widely applauded.

It has been to questions from partners. We received some twenty-odd questions from the attendees for Feijóo, and among them there was a certain concentration on this topic.

What do you think of the tribute?

We are very much in line with this idea that by definition it is an unfair tax, because you return to tax for income that has already been paid for inheritance or income. It is a very unique tax, because it is practically not in any geography and leaves you in a weaker competitive position. And in Spain it has the grievance, in addition, that you are competing with autonomous communities that have subsidized it 100%. We have criticized it a lot, it is logical that the partners applauded.

The president of the PP has criticized it, but he has not promised to change it either...

Well, open the door.

However, he has received more applause than anyone.

That has happened historically. Opposition leaders have more freedom to speak, are less subject to public scrutiny and perhaps have an easier time getting more applause.

And Vice President Calviño?

He has also made a very good intervention, I think it has coincided very much with the Cercle's diagnosis of the famous lost decade. In the sense that the country model after the entry into the euro was an irrational model based on an almost monoculture of residential construction and with a massive relocation of other industries. The brutal effects of the imbalances with which we arrived at 2007 –private debt, trade balance, weight of the real estate sector in GDP as a whole– exploded with the financial crisis and the bill we pay in terms of productivity and per capita income has been very spectacular.

The Cercle has spoken out against the electoral advance.

Well, against it, no. It is a power that the President of the Government has, and he has his reasons for doing so. We speak out against polarization as an impediment to working on what the country needs, which are agreements to achieve productivity improvements. And as we're making this speech, we find out that we're going to have a few months of polarization because it's hard to think that this election isn't more polarized than ever.

And in Catalonia, can we return to the polarization experienced during the 'procés'?

I think that sooner or later we will begin to see academic papers that explain the economic effects of the process. It is complicated because they are not so much the direct effects as the lost investments or things that have not come to fruition and we do not know what effect they would have had. This issue of the procés had been appeased and an electoral campaign, depending on how it is raised, can cause to stop that appeasement. It is an interesting topic and debate, but we have not wanted to get involved, we still do not have too many references and it is very short term. But yes, we have to follow it closely.

Minister Calviño, also the President of the Generalitat and the Minister of Economy have been very optimistic about the future.

But the gap with Europe does not stop growing.

The imbalance, the adjustment and this lost decade have caused this inequality. If the GDP grows a lot, but the GDP per capita does not grow, in the end what you are producing is an accumulation of low-wage jobs, which ends up involving a lot of immigration. And that also puts a lot of pressure on social services.

And the new housing law?

We are a bit critical. It has positive factors such as the generation of public housing stock, some tax incentives for those who rent affordable or social housing. But the incentive regarding how the market works is not well placed. In the end, if you want to reduce rents, what you have to do is have more supply. In Catalonia we have had a pilot experience that has not worked and now we have turned it into a standard for the entire State.