If there is no unexpected outcome, an unlikely last-minute script twist, the Government will see the Parliament return the 2024 budgets that it approved a couple of weeks ago. They would be the second Catalan accounts to fall into history since the democratic restoration. The first setback was in 2016, with Carles Puigdemont as president, Oriol Junqueras as vice president, and the current head of the Catalan Executive, Pere Aragonès, as Secretary General of the Economy.
History can therefore repeat itself today if the disagreement between the current Government and En Comú Podem with the tourism and leisure macro project projected in Tarragona, the Hard Rock, is consummated. The president and the leader of the commons, Jéssica Albiach, met yesterday afternoon in Palau for about 45 minutes and there was no way to find an agreement.
The Government insists that there is no room to discard the urban master plan (PDU) of the Hard Rock, which would give life to a project that has been stranded for a decade, and the commons demanded from the president a public declaration “that the Hard Rock will not be is going to do”, something that would cause Aragonès to lose the support of Salvador Illa's PSC, the only party with which he has reached an agreement to save his accounts. The shock is total and leaves the Catalan budgets on the verge of shipwreck.
Not even the pressure maneuvers that have occurred in recent hours have softened either party. The Government has used its influence in Madrid to try to get, via Moncloa, the common people to agree to an agreement, without ruling out Hard Rock, of course. And the commons have asserted their autonomy with respect to Sumar and Yolanda Díaz and have attacked ERC as a “subaltern party to the PSC.”
In the meeting between Aragonès and Albiach there was no room for agreement. Albiach went to Palau after denouncing in the media that he had not spoken to the president for weeks, but the phrase he heard the most from his interlocutor was, according to sources from his party, “the PSC does not accept this.” ”.
Nor do they appreciate that there has been great progress in the more technical content of the negotiations. “They do not accept the sixth hour in education, nor money for housing…” (1,000 million and a specific regulation for seasonal rentals). Upon leaving Palau, the commoners left with the feeling that ERC “is trapped by the PSC”, and that the multiple pacts tied with the socialists, also with the central government, have reduced Aragonès's room for maneuver to a minimum. .
The feeling in the Government is that the common people, "and particularly Albiach", have decided their position "whatever the offer they receive." “Possibly with Ada Colau behind,” they add. All in all, the Republicans are not throwing in the towel, but they have assumed that the solution depends almost only – and still – on the intervention of Sumar, from Madrid.
Be that as it may, the situation is delicate for Esquerra, and electoral progress is an option that the Government does not want to study until today's debate in Parliament is resolved.
