Let love die! And long live the budgets!

When marriages were arranged as a business, in historical terms until two days ago, nobody lost sleep over the romantic ingredient of the matter.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
01 February 2023 Wednesday 05:38
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Let love die! And long live the budgets!

When marriages were arranged as a business, in historical terms until two days ago, nobody lost sleep over the romantic ingredient of the matter. Affection and respect will come, the old men and women of the place said to the young people who were going to the altar like the majority to work: to fulfill an obligation. ERC and the PSC have recovered that old tradition with the budgets. Passionate love has too much border with hate, so it is better to return to what is really convenient: the gifts. Who puts the house? How many hectares do we add between the two? How many sheets, duvets, towels and table linen does the trousseau contain?

ERC receives extra balls from its new partner to extend the legislature. It is not a small thing. Pere Aragonès's party needs time to consolidate the idea that it handles the art of governing with solvency and banish the prejudice that still accompanies it of actually being a minor and amateur company that is, yes, lucky enough to act in the big room of the National Theatre.

For their part, the Catalan socialists strengthen the idea of ​​being a responsible party, capable of putting aside their particular interests and giving up their votes for the common good; even though they were the ones who won the elections in their day.

Nobody in autochthonous socialism has an interest in pointing out that the head of the family, Pedro Sánchez, needs and will need that marriage union in Catalonia. The fact that Illa has managed the negotiation of the dowry of Aragonès and Junqueras with great skill does not erase the ascendancy of the interests that revolve around Moncloa. In the clans, the one who wears the largest gold seal with his initials on the ring finger rules. And the inscription of the single ring that governs them all in socialism reads PSOE. The PSC has added gains. He returns through the front door to centrality - he already had the votes that accredited him - and clinches his strategy of being the only constitutionalist formation in a position to numb the independence drive. Naturalizing it, letting it run wild but at the same time channeling it towards the siding of nonsense.

Any action, including marriage, carries its opportunity cost. For ERC it is very showy. The choice of hereu Illa as a bed partner allows JXCAT to accelerate its opposition strategy to the cry of the tripartite return, autonomy returns. The first page of this book has already been opened with the tactical movement of Jordi Turull offering stability to Pere Aragonès if he finally did not go to the altar. Hence, ERC must also shout with equal force, but with little credibility, that sooner rather than later there will be a new referendum.

With the arrival of Pere Aragonès to the presidency of the Generalitat, Catalan politics returned in a way to 2012 -the need to agree with the State on a consultation- and now JXCat will try to make the idea that we go back to 2003, the year in which the tripartite was born. Catalans, from this perspective, jump from decade to decade. Just backwards. We may not be as creative as we think and deep down we are like children who always ask for the same story before going to bed.

The budget agreement comes in parallel to the opinion of the CJEU on the Euro-orders of Judge Pablo Llarena. The past creeping into the present. A budget agreement that definitively breaks the bloc policy in Catalonia while the consequences of unilateralism continue to occupy the front pages. One more paradox. As it is that JXCat makes a big fuss about ERC's turn to realism but has no qualms about praying to the convergent saint of Xavier Trias so that he tries to win the mayoralty of Barcelona with a speech that is not at all challenging on the national axis. Deep down, everyone already lives in the present -even if it crosses with the past- and they know that the future will be neither the one they promised nor the one they said they dreamed of.

The approval of the accounts, in addition to giving Pere Aragonès a clue to continue wearing the presidential insignia on his lapel, keeps Catalonia as the final point of the electoral cycle that begins with the municipal elections in May and will continue with the general elections in November. The results of these elections will distribute new cards and dictate a new present. Until then let's celebrate the interested link between ERC and PSC. Although the bride and groom will not live or sleep together, according to what the spouses have told us. Nothing happens. History shows that such marriages are usually the most peaceful, if not the longest.