In the Palau de la Generalitat there is not a trace of the 850 square meters of fabrics from the time of Primo de Rivera that covered the Salón Sant Jordi. Goodbye to the Catholic Monarchs, to María Cristina and Alfonso XIII and to “For God and for Spain, one soul, one heart.” What has returned to Palau is the honor guard of the Mossos, again with their Mausers, to receive Pedro Sánchez, a new Spain with an asymmetric will, dialogue and promises to reinforce self-government.
The pro-independence pragmatism to which the President of the Government appeals to shield the legislature has come through parliamentary arithmetic in Madrid. He has been with ERC for four years and now with Carles Puigdemont and Junts. The post-convergents agreed on their differences with the PSOE and now extend the shadow of doubt over the specificities that ERC aims for after Sánchez's visit to the Palau. In the works of the Sant Jordi room, some windows have been discovered that were boarded up during the dictatorship. The trencadís stained glass windows offer extra light, and the Republican Government takes advantage of it when management problems become pressing.
The agreements between Sánchez and Pere Aragonès deepen the socialist recipe for harmony but also feed ERC and, therefore, narrow Salvador Illa's margin. Beyond the parliamentary staging, ERC assumes an exchange of budgets in Parliament and Congress – if there are no accounts in Madrid there is no transfer of Rodalies. And if Pere Aragonès is able to capitalize on the benefits of the fluid relationship with the socialist leader, without noise in the messages and management, ERC believes that the incentives of the PSC alternative may suffer.
The dependence on the Catalan independence movement, the PNV and Bildu leads Sánchez to feed plurality, differential facts and harmonize the desire for self-government that discourages the desire for a referendum in Catalonia. It is the plural Spain. Constitutional Spain. "Spain in positive" by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's PSOE of Santillana, fertilized with the Granada declaration and irrigated with the current needs in Congress. Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba defended in 2013 that “there is a right to difference, not a difference in rights” and, after the wounds of the Statute and the process, the “new stage” in relations between the Government and the Generalitat is underpinned by squeezing self-government. …for whoever wants it.
The multilingualism law, the transfer (two years late) of the minimum vital income, the removal of the debt of the autonomies with the FLA or the transfer of Rodalies are doors open to all communities. Party slogans are not valid when what is at stake are services to citizens and their operation impacts regional elections. The PP criticizes the concessions to the independence movement, Isabel Díaz Ayuso adds fuel to the fire, but Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla raises his arm to manage his Cercanías. The divergence will be reproduced when addressing the update of the financing system and Ayuso will not be able to tell the president of the Board that he also dumps. The income does not give him.
After the 2009 agreement, the socialists have never gone beyond accepting the principle of ordinality to regulate the financing of communities. That is, the autonomies that contribute the most to the State coffers do not see their position diminished when it comes to receiving the resources that correspond to them from the central administration. The financing system has expired since 2014, but there are precepts in the Statute to be developed on the matter, such as the State-Generalitat tax consortium.
This consortium had to be transformed into the tax administration of Catalonia with the capacity to manage, collect, liquidate and inspect the State's taxes. Once the amnesty law is discounted, “reinforcing” the financing of Catalonia, in the words of Sánchez, and complying with the bilateral dialogue on the matter established in the agreements with ERC and Junts is the challenge of the legislature. The unknown is the asymmetry that the PSOE can tolerate and whether moving towards a fiscal pact is as or more difficult than achieving independence.
