A large Catalan industrial company, a year ago, was about to make the decision to return its headquarters to Barcelona, it has been in Madrid since October 2017, but in the end it gave up due to the electrical crossing of pride between two of its most prominent shareholders. Despite the fact that the matter should not be taken for granted and it may end up taking the step unexpectedly postponed. Things from the family business, so characteristic of Catalonia. Would they be an influential difference now, in this moment of critical negotiation for the investiture of Pedro Sánchez between socialists and pro-independence parties?
Who knows, maybe it could have opened the way for some others who are in similar situations and who would have taken advantage of the stimulus to pack their bags as well. A drag effect in the opposite direction to what took place in the critical post-referendum week. Obviously, lower, since it is ruled out that the two great engines of the exit and references of the Catalan economy, La Caixa d'Isidre Fainé and Banc Sabadell of Josep Oliu, have plans to do so. These large financial entities live on a tripod: their corporate (and fiscal) headquarters in the Valencian Country and two operational headquarters, the more financial one in Madrid and the traditional one in Barcelona.
Now, in the Catalan capital, the illustrious owners are on display who complain about having to take the AVE or the plane once a month to go to Madrid and meet in a council where they find the same faces he sees every day at the company's office in Barcelona. They even explain, in hindsight, that they believe there was no reason to approve what they approved, since nothing happened in the end. The then president of the Generalitat and today a refugee in Waterloo, Carles Puigdemont, set off political fireworks for a few seconds, but things continued exactly the same. There were no street riots, nor practical decisions by the pro-independence parties; the promised State structures that they said they had been preparing for years did not even appear. They think that they were carried away by panic and the desire to express their discomfort with the political atmosphere in the streets of Barcelona, something different in the case of banks, with customers withdrawing money with their hands full.
The bourgeoisie felt defeated and, fearful, fled. And they have to endure the condescending gaze of those who chose to stay and avoided shame and vilification.
But, of course, it would be going too far to spread the perception or think that this is the dominant view among the employers who left. The majority of those who left still think that they did what was necessary and for the moment do not consider returning if the great political unknowns are not clarified first, including the future behavior of pro-independence forces and possible unilateralism of their decisions.
For the time being, as long as there are no changes, the return would force them to give explanations again, but in this case to the host city, about the reasons for leaving and without a political cover with which to protect the new migration under the cloak of a great political agreement and the protection of the herd. A nightmare, they think.
And, the longer the situation lasts, the more difficult it will be for them to do so. It has been a long time since many companies nurtured their organizational charts with executives from the state capital. They also hire professional services of all kinds, generally of high quality and good pay, in the city itself. A professional perspective that holds an important sector of the Catalan middle classes, who have always nurtured, without the need to change residence, this kind of demands.
The pro-independence leaders have begun to recognize in public something that they only recognized in the strictest privacy or with blatant irritation as a response to businessmen or financiers when they announced the decision to leave: that what happened to the companies was a real tragedy for the Catalan economy.
But the political unknowns mentioned before do not only refer to the behavior of independence supporters. Although the majority of the Catalan bourgeois class voted for the PP in the last general elections, especially attracted by the fiscal candy from Madrid (and now Andalusia, Valencia, etc.), they also had in mind that a government led by Alberto Núñez Feijóo in comandita with Santiago Abascal would have been real dynamite for Catalan politics and society. An additional reason not to return.
These days some media in Madrid have raised the specter that an amnesty for pro-independence supporters from the future Sánchez government would be an additional incentive for companies not to return. However, it only takes a while to talk with entrepreneurs, financiers and executives in Barcelona to discover the falsity of this interpretation. Catalan businessmen are committed to turning the page and know that the amnesty is one of the main pages of the new process.
In fact, the large Catalan business organization, Foment, behind which are the bulk of the large Catalan companies that changed their headquarters and which is chaired by the former Christian Democrat leader Josep Sánchez Llibre, has openly played this card. In the corridors of Catalan economic power, the possible chips are being moved so that the agreement becomes tougher and the amnesty allows progress to be made in terms of the normalization of Catalan political life. They even try that, should this happen, the announcement is accompanied by normalization moves by the companies themselves.
