The president of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has spent a lot of time in Barcelona since his rise to the highest responsibility in his party. He started at the Cercle d'Economia, at the beginning of May and since then he has been lavish in the Catalan capital. And he has met with businessmen and other social sectors. One of the outstanding meetings was at the headquarters of Foment del Treball, the organization chaired by Josep Sánchez Llibre, in this case with a small group of businessmen.
There, the Galician politician made references to the classic concerns of economic organizations, among which taxes always figure prominently. And he made it clear that in this matter the fiscal policy developed by the Community of Madrid, now chaired by Isabel Díaz Ayuso, but also with her predecessors, especially the pioneer Esperanza Aguirre. And that, he assured, the recent winner in the Andalusian elections, Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla, will also follow.
Systematic tax cuts on the way to suppress estate and inheritance taxes. Two of the black beasts of the Catalan and Spanish noble halls, oblivious to the political debate on whether Madrid applies fiscal dumping taking advantage of the privileges of being the capital. And although Feijóo's position is known, businessmen always like to hear it live and from the mouth of the person who aspires to preside over the Government.
Some great businessman expressed to the Galician his frustration at the non-existence of a Catalan political party with the capacity to negotiate in Madrid with the PP and PSOE from a moderate Catalanist perspective. In short, the longing for the old Convergència i Unió (CiU), an aggiornamento of the classic pujolismo. Coalition that died in the storm of the procés and for which at the moment there is no known recovery and with sufficient foundations.
Far from taking it as someone else's business, Feijóo decided to take the bull by the horns and raised the question of why the PP could not be that Catalanist party. Making use of his own political trajectory, he explained that Galicianism is embodied by that conservative party in his community of origin, Galicia; as it is now beginning to do with Andalusianism from the Sevillian capital.
He came to say that he represents a new PP that wants to collect the various territorial aspirations. A memory of his first intervention in the Cercle d'Economia conference and that aroused so many suspicions beyond the Ebro. To the point that it is not known now, what he himself thinks of his definition of Catalonia as a nationality.
The Spanish right has always had two big black holes in Catalonia and the Basque Country. And in times of boom in the polls or government boom, initiatives have been proposed to break their ceiling in those territories, so important demographically and economically.
In the Catalan case, there have been proposals for the integration of moderate nationalism in the Spanish conservative party. José María Aznar, the former president of the PP, did it in 2001, after his party obtained the best result in its history in Catalonia in the 2000 general elections, when he proposed to Jordi Pujol that CiU should have ministers in his Government. He then tried Artur Mas again to go even further and create a federation of parties in the Navarran or Bavarian style. A takeover bid as long stubborn as it was unsuccessful.
The Catalan nationalists accepted pacts, from that of the Hotel Majestic to other specific ones in the Parlament and in Congress, but they never contemplated being part of the central government – although there were leaders such as Miquel Roca or Josep Antoni Duran i Lleida, who considered it even though they were always in the minority – nor to dissolve into an alliance with the PP.
Returning to the present, Feijóo has shown complicity these days with business complaints about the State's low investment in infrastructure in Catalonia and has drawn a more regionalist profile than any of his predecessors at the head of the PP. But surely most of his interlocutors think that this is not enough.
A central political alternative in Catalonia cannot fail to include central elements in its program such as the shielding of Catalan, full autonomy in areas such as education and a significant change in regional financing. The main lines of the first Mas before the sovereignist conversion.
As if this were not enough, one of the guidelines for action in the Catalan business world since 2017 has been the recovery of political stability –which it considers a prerequisite for economic stability–, something that largely involves healing the wounds of the procés. Among them, although not only, the pardon of political prisoners, a measure approved by the Government of Pedro Sánchez. Processes in which some business leaders intervened personally in front of the head of the Government, as was the case of Sánchez Llibre. A resolution that in Catalonia has broad social support and that, precisely, the PP, in addition to Vox, has appealed to the Supreme Court.
