The President of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, wanted to attend the session that the PP had designed in the Senate to debate the eventual amnesty being negotiated by the President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, to defend its necessity - as in his day his predecessor Pasqual Maragall did with the Statute – and ended up causing the material debate to surface that seems to worry the rest of the communities, at least those governed by the PP: regional funding.
The president did not deviate from the topic and in his scarce ten minutes of intervention he defended the amnesty not as the end point of the political crisis opened by 1-O, but as a starting point the station of the term of which should be an "agreed and recognized" referendum in which the Catalans could decide on their political future.
He didn't say anything that he hadn't said before or that Esquerra Republicana hasn't repeated in recent months, but he wanted it to have the solemnity of being pronounced in the old Upper Chamber - the meeting of the general commission of the Autonomous Communities was in 'old session hall of the Senate, not in the new hemicycle–: "Amnesty is indispensable to put an end to exiles, fines, espionage, persecution (...), to put an end to the general cause against the independence".
Aragonès, who did not stay to listen to the interventions and responses of the rest of the regional presidents – those of the PP, the socialist presidents and the Lehendakari did not attend – and the senators, wanted to destroy the claim of the popular people with his presence , he said, of setting up a debate that instrumentalizes Catalonia for the fight with the PSOE and is disinterested in the interests of Catalan citizens. "You took it for granted that you could talk about Catalonia without the representative of Catalonia", he criticized. Aragonès' hypothesis is that if the PP was interested in the well-being of Catalan society, it would not bring to the Upper House a debate on the end of the judicialization of the political conflict, but issues that affect the quality of life of Catalan citizens, such as " the fiscal deficit of 22,000 million euros per year", an underfunding that affects, he affirmed, investments in public systems of health, education, infrastructure, security or culture, "resources that Catalans pay in taxes, but not in we can arrange".
The sentence seemed to operate as if he had uttered a Hogwarts spell, undoing the amnesty spell, and then the material concerns of the territories emerged. The successive interventions of the regional presidents of the PP – an exhibition of the territorial wardrobe of the popular ones, with Alfonso Rueda, Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla, Marga Prohens, María José Saenz de Buruaga, Gonzalo Capellán, Fernando López Miras, Carlos Mazón, Jorge Azcón , María Guardiola, Isabel Díaz Ayuso and Alfonso Fernández Mañueco – devoted many more minutes to the possibility that the investiture negotiation would include an eventual forgiveness of the Catalan debt and a fiscal pact for the Generalitat than they occupied with the amnesty. Almost all of the participating communities said they were underfunded – most of which have reduced their income by reducing taxes and the regional funding model dates back to 2009 – and, loyal to the slogan of the PP in recent weeks, they all cried out for "equality between Spaniards".
The session was paradoxical, with the low profile of the PSOE, whose presidents did not go to the session, the brief presence of Aragonès and the unique and long meeting of regional presidents of the PP, with an air of confederality that the popular have always distrusted the calls of the Conference of Presidents, a body created 19 years ago by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.
