Within the institutional normality in which relations between the Government and the Generalitat have settled, the Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, who was visiting Barcelona yesterday, and the President of the Catalan Government, Pere Aragonès, held a meeting Discreet to catch up and review management issues that affect Catalonia.
During the meeting, which was held in complete discretion and which was not publicized in their respective agendas, both politicians valued the relationship between the two governments, once the PSC has given support to the Catalan budgets and Pedro Sánchez's legislature faces his last year, marked by the electoral context.
Sources close to the two politicians did not want to give details of the meeting beyond considering the dialogue positive at a time when Aragonès' governability is guaranteed and the bloc policy in Catalonia has been broken.
In May the municipal elections are held and at the end of the year, the general ones. Aragonès and Bolaños spoke about the type of relationship they will maintain in that electoral context that will surely leave the dialogue table in hibernation.
On Tuesday, the spokesperson for the Government, Patrícia Plaja, already expressed doubts that this space for negotiation between the Government and the Generalitat could meet again this year and considered it practically impossible to hold a new meeting. The last of the meetings was held in July of last year, and despite ERC's support for the general state budget in December, the table was not finally held.
The Government understands that the Catalan accounts pact, reached between the ERC and the PSC, is a turning point for Catalonia. Not only because of what it represents to break the strategy of the pro-independence majority, but also because the agreement helps the difficult balances that Pedro Sánchez maintains in Congress.
Aragonès admitted to Bolaños that it had cost a lot to reach that pact with the Catalan socialists, while acknowledging the many concessions he had had to make to unblock the budgets.
This rapprochement between Moncloa and the Government also occurs in a context marked by the decisions of the Supreme Court and the Prosecutor's Office to apply in their own way the reform of the Penal Code, agreed upon by the Sánchez Executive and the Republicans.
In yesterday's meeting, this issue was not evaded, which in recent days has faced harsh reproaches against the Government and the Government. The conversation addressed the procedural situation in which two of Oriol Junqueras's lieutenants find themselves: Josep Maria Jové, former Secretary General of the Ministry of Economy, and Lluís Salvadó, former Secretary of Finance, whom the Prosecutor's Office considers responsible for organize the 1-O and prepare the State structures of a possible independent Catalonia, and applies the aggravated embezzlement that provides for more years in prison.
The two politicians met on the morning before Aragonès left on an official trip to Ireland to meet with Sinn Féin leaders Mary Lou McDonald and Michelle O'Neill. For his part, Bolaños, who arrived on Wednesday, had a busy schedule in Barcelona yesterday. Before noon he went to visit the port of Barcelona, which will host the America's Cup next year, where he highlighted "the shared work" between all the institutions. At noon he met with the candidate for mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni.
