While Pedro Sánchez and Alberto Núñez Feijóo were beating each other in Congress, immersed in the din of an implacable dispute that transcends politics to enter the personal sphere, in Catalonia the dice were thrown and the board turned.
The commons consummated their warning and refused to support the budgets of Pere Aragonès because the president does not renounce the Hard Rock, a leisure tourist project in Tarragona that includes casinos and which the PSC puts as a condition to support the bills as well . ERC failed to solve the puzzle and the president calls elections for May 12. Suddenly, everything turns upside down.
With the amnesty pact closed, Sánchez hoped to approve the State budgets as soon as possible with the support of ERC and Junts to give the legislature at least two years of breathing space. But with the Catalan election on the horizon, it is impossible for ERC and Junts to support Sánchez, therefore, he renounces this year's elections and will work directly for those in 2025, which, by the way, will be more austere, since the fiscal rules imposed by the EU will begin to govern. Sánchez was already advised by some collaborators to skip the 2024 ones, but he wanted to maintain the line of the previous legislature: the central government approves the budgets within the deadline and in the appropriate form as a symbol of stability, despite the noise of the opposition. This same week he boasted about it in the Courts.
The Catalan electoral advance has been unexpected, especially in Madrid. Aragonès insisted on exhausting the legislature until February 2025, although some recommended an advance to save himself a summer of water restrictions due to drought or the possibility of fires. Also to take Junts with the changed step, waiting to elect the candidate. Until a week ago Aragonès believed it was possible to continue. On Sunday he already saw that no.
Together, he hoped to dispute ERC's pro-independence supremacy in the European elections with Carles Puigdemont at the helm and then wait to see if he was granted amnesty before the Catalan elections. Or at least play with that possibility. It gets more complicated with the advance, even though it was already seen that the judicial proceedings will delay the application of the amnesty for at least a year. In the end, Puigdemont will be a candidate (he has not been convicted and can be elected) even knowing that he could not take office as president even if he won, because he will not be able to step on Catalonia.
It's a well-known film. He was already a candidate in December 2017. He played with the equivocation and moved the idea that he could be invested remotely. He finished second, but in front of ERC. The Republicans did not allow him to invest remotely, something that the leader of Junts has never forgiven them. It then re-entered the charts in 2021, finishing third.
It remains up in the air if he could take possession of the seat remotely, as did Lluís Puig, who votes electronically from Brussels, and also if when he is amnestied he would recover all his prerogatives as a deputy. But this is advancing events. The second or third on the list will be the real candidate.
ERC tried in the last few days for Moncloa to help clear the Catalan budgets with its influence on Salvador Illai Yolanda Díaz. It was a blind road. The communes have agreed autonomy with respect to Sumar in the area of Catalonia and Díaz also does not have much sympathy for an ERC that rejected his labor reform. For the common people, the Hard Rock will be the electoral symbol of the country model to be fought.
In the case of Illa, Sánchez also could not ask him to back out of the agreement on the Hard Rock when the leader of the PSC is gambling on the electoral victory. That Illa wins the elections and, above all, that he becomes president is the balm that Sánchez entrusts to justify the Amnesty law in Spain. The personal and political relationship between Sánchez and Illa was forged during the pandemic in a very special way. Catalan is grateful to the president for his treatment in those difficult months, and the PSC can infuse oxygen into the president of the central government. If Illa's bet on Hard Rock has induced the elections, Sánchez is gambling everything on the Illa card.
