The Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya and En Comú Podem have until now been the partners of the accounts of the Generalitat that is now led by the republican Pere Aragonès. However, a white elephant lives within this progressive majority: the execution of the Hard Rock recreational megaproject in Tarragona, with hundreds of hotel beds, megacasinos and intended mainly for holding conventions. Faced with the closed support of the socialists and the frontal ‘no’ of the commons, ERC has taken a lukewarm middle path that has allowed it to overcome the division. However, the two partners now warn that they will not tolerate it anymore and ask the president to get involved, thus complicating an already very complicated negotiation.
ERC has only 33 votes in the Parliament and, with Junts installed in a belligerent opposition, only the sum of PSC (33) and those led by Jéssica Albiach (8) allows it to comfortably overcome the absolute majority of 68. For days now, both Possible partners, each one on their own, have been tightening the rope in view of the next budgets and this Friday it was precisely Albiach who presented the ultimatum.
“If he president wants accounts, it has to say definitively no to the largest casino in Europe, in Camp de Tarragona,” Albiach said in an interview with the Catalan News Agency. The commons had until now bought the ambiguity of the Republicans regarding the project – which is waiting for environmental and urban permits but whose casinos already have a license -, accepting that the Government did not include any effective item on the project that is now dragging on little. more than a decade on paper.
In a parliamentary response from the Government, published on the 5th in the Official Gazette of the Parliament, the commons also attacked the project not only because of the immense waste of water that it would entail, something that conflicts with the new water reality that the Catalan coast. They also asked the Executive for explanations because on the one hand it warned of the danger of gambling but at the same time promoted the mega casino.
However, the PSC also presses for the other side and there, although at the moment it does not exert pressure with the Budgets, Junts is also in favor of the casino complex. “They don’t fool me twice,” the leader of the socialists, Salvador Illa, told Efe in an interview to complain about the lack of compliance with various commitments already acquired in previous negotiations of the accounts, including the unblocking of the Hard Rock project. “President Aragonès will know what he does, I am not going to be the one to question his credibility, we reached agreements and they have to be fulfilled. Until this happens, we will not begin to negotiate the eventual 2024 budgets.” Already in November, the spokesperson for that group, Alícia Romero, put the Hard Rock and the B-40, a ring road in the Barcelona Metropolitan Area, as priorities.
The previous Budget agreement signed between PSC and ERC aimed to complete this year the processes related to the start of the project and maintain the availability of the land, in the municipality of Vilaseca, next to the Port Aventura theme park. Their owner is La Caixa and the current agreement makes the Generalitat buy them and sell them to the promoters in a single act for 120 million euros. The official position of the Generalitat is that it is not opposed to the project but that it has to meet all standards if it wants to move forward.
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The Generalitat was precisely the last entity that raised objections to the processing of the project. ON September 14, it raised objections due to the possibility of chemical risk, as the land was very close to the Tarragona petrochemical industrial estate. The Climate Action department, in October 2022, declared that the master plan approved also in 2022 does not meet the necessary environmental requirements. That plan had come from another, which saw the light of day in 2016, but which the No Juguem, Aturem Hard Rock platform took to the courts, which in 2020 requested to make changes.
Within ERC, some leaders believe that the via crucis that this process is becoming could make its North American promoters give up. That would prevent the Generalitat from having to respond for non-compliance with a casino clause that was precisely approved when Oriol Junqueras was the economic vice president, which was the one that gave the initial permission.
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