The businessman, who is very influential in Barcelona’s social life, has gone deep with the scalpel and has extended himself into a long dissection of the vicissitudes of a decade of turbulent Catalan politics. To conclude, he leaves aside subtleties and resorts to the crudest language. “The business world is fed up with it,” he sums up. He pauses briefly and expands on the statement: “People are fed up with it… The separatists are fed up with it!”
Similar things, in fact, can be heard even from the mouths of some ERC MPs or members of the critical sector of Junts. “What we need now is four years of a boring government,” says, with a touch of irony, another interlocutor with long experience in business and the post-convergent world. And nothing better for this than a man who has made boredom his banner. That Salvador Illa who with his premeditated dullness emerged unscathed from the worst pandemic in a century and now relies on the same recipe to face the most devilish political situation in democratic Spain. Determined to undertake what another prominent Catalan financier defines as “abandoning the politics of emotions and dedicating himself once and for all to management.” A contrast that hovered over the investiture debate in the Parliament last Thursday. While the leader of the PSC promised to put the concern for material things back in the foreground, the spokesperson for Junts, Albert Batet, continued to go round and round about the “conflict”, without mentioning the economy, health or housing.
The sun was already beginning to scorch Barcelona at eight o’clock on that Thursday morning and next to the Arc de Triomf built in the Parc de la Ciutadella for the Universal Exhibition of 1888 the first flags fluttered. esteladasIt was the place chosen to honour the return of Carles Puigdemont, which was intended to be triumphant and ended in a farce, embarrassing to the point of ridicule for the Mossos d’Esquadra and disconcerting for many of the followers of the former president. There the realm of emotions still reigned, embodied in images such as that of the woman who burst into tears because she could not approach him when he emerged from an alley next to Trafalgar Street, where the top brass of Junts had been waiting for him for more than half an hour without any dissimulation, with the president of the Parliament, Josep Rull, at the head. In the days of euphoria of the processsuch an event would have attracted a large crowd. On this scorching August morning, the attendees numbered about 3,500, most of them people of retirement age, although youthful in appearance with their protest T-shirts or wrapped in their esteladas as a cape. In the early afternoon, when social networks were already boiling with memes about Puigdemont’s escape and the investiture debate was advancing, in front of the entrance gate to the Parliament grounds a couple of seventy-year-olds resisted alone with a sign against the “pact of shame” of ERC with the socialists.
The investiture of Illa has constituted, in a very widespread opinion among politics and social forces, the final nail in the coffin of the process already sculpted in the elections last May. During the parliamentary debate, only the leader of the PP, Alejandro Fernández, refuted this idea, arguing that the pacts with ERC for an economic agreement that would take Catalonia out of the common system of autonomous financing represent the beginning of “another I proceededs, although renovated and remodeled.”
Puigdemont also insisted in a recorded message this Saturday that the “process will only end with independence.” But he immediately admitted: “What is evident is that a certain phase has ended.” That phase characterized, according to him, by “a certain way of doing things, with civil society organized alongside the political forces of the entire independence spectrum.” A way of definitively closing that kind of revolution in which up to two million Catalans were involved and which led to the institutional disobedience of its leaders. What they called the “Smile Revolution [sonrisas]”or, from a more realistic perspective, the “dress rehearsal for a revolt,” as he defined it in a 2019 book the journalist and now ERC deputy in Congress Francesc-Marc Álvaro. The adventure that the then ERC member of parliament undertook in 2012 president Artur Mas in pursuit of an independence that he himself had described years ago as a “medieval” project and that the patriarch Jordi Pujol always dismissed as a chimera that would never be accepted by the Spanish State. “That does not mean that the independence movement is going to disappear or stop having its electoral expression,” warns a former nationalist now in the PSC. “What has ended is this policy of words and grandiloquent gestures.”
He process It was the result of a mutation, which led classical Catalanism to adopt an independence programme, an almost marginal option for decades. Its decline has to do with another mutation, less drastic and spectacular: the conversion of the PSC, led by Illa and Pedro Sánchez from La Moncloa, into the force that has occupied the centre of Catalan politics. In the wine and roses days of Pujolism, it was said that CiU was the pal of paller [literalmente, el palo del pajar, la clave de bóveda, en una traducción libre] The PSC is a political power that is not only a political force, but also a political power that is not a party to the Catalan political system. Its drift towards an uncompromising independence movement, even alongside an anti-capitalist force like the CUP, alienated it from the support of businesses and sectors of the conservative middle classes. Today its greatest institutional powers are the Girona Provincial Council and the mayor’s office in Sant Cugat del Vallès (100,000 inhabitants). Although far from the strength that Pujolism once had, the PSC has accumulated the greatest institutional power and has inherited that privileged position that allows it to capture votes from the centre-right to the centre-left, being the favourite of a large part of the business community – “the party of order”, as a banker defines it – and the interlocutor of the unions and the formations to its left.
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A great advantage for Illa, but also a potential problem. His tight position – he has only one vote over the opposition – has been supported by his left, ERC and the Comuns. And with the latter he has agreed on issues that have not been well received in the world of money: the maintenance of wealth and inheritance taxes, as well as the renunciation of the Hard Rock macro-casino. In exchange, the Comuns have assumed that the socialists will continue to defend the expansion of El Prat airport, which they reject for environmental reasons and the business community considers essential and would like to see it approved with the support of Junts and the PP.
The leadership of Catalunya en Comú is very satisfied with the programmatic agreement, although without taking anything for granted: “We will be vigilant, we do not know what Illa we are going to find. Until now this has been a very conservative PSC, far from Maragall’s party.” The unions have also welcomed the content of the pacts, but, due to the same mistrust regarding the intentions of the new party, presidentwould welcome an expansion of the Government to include their parliamentary allies to strengthen the left-wing profile. Ending political instability is not enough, stresses Javier Pacheco, general secretary of CC OO: “Catalonia has had many years of stability and that has not served to solve our serious social problems. What we need are new policies.”
The issue that is causing the most concern in the rest of Spain – the possibility of granting Catalonia a special financial regime – is one of the issues that generates the most consensus internally. At the investiture, the only one who raised the opposing voice was the popular Fernández, who denounced that an attempt was being made to establish a confederal model. de facto evading the required constitutional reform. This is the basis for his opinion that a new era has begun process. In Catalonia, moreover, almost identical statements can be heard from the mouth of a fund manager, a leader of the comuns or a trade unionist. They all repeat the idea of an underfunded community with great social needs and pockets of poverty, far, they say, from that cliché of the opulent, privileged and unsupportive Catalonia, “the miser in the Christmas story”, as Pacheco, from CC OO, says.
For the moment, there is scepticism about the viability of this kind of agreement, which is still poorly defined in the agreements between the PSC and ERC. One of the principles that has the greatest consensus is that of preserving the so-called ordinality, that is, that each community has the same position in the classification of what it contributes (Catalonia is third) as in what it receives per inhabitant (thirteenth). This is emphasized by Joaquim Coello, businessman, former president of the port of Barcelona, one of the mediators who in the autumn of 2017 tried to avoid the total clash and today a defender of the benefits that Sánchez’s policy of détente has brought to Catalonia, “regardless of what his motives may have been.” Coello sees it possible to satisfy Catalan demands without harming anyone else, provided that the Government makes an economic effort. The model would be extended to the seven communities that would benefit the most: Catalonia (which would gain 6 billion), Andalusia, Madrid, Valencia, Murcia, Castilla-La Mancha and the Balearic Islands. The rest would remain as is. The bill would be paid by the central government, which would have to contribute, according to its calculations, 25 billion euros over a period of five years.
Among all the uncertainties, one stands out, the resolution of which will remain in the hands of the man from Waterloo. It is one of those paradoxes of politics: the less Junts has a say in Catalonia, the more decisive it is in Madrid. In his hands remains the key that can sustain or overthrow Sánchez’s government. Among the people who were waiting for Puigdemont’s arrival on Thursday, a woman shouted to the spokesperson for Junts in Congress, Míriam Nogueras:
—Miriam, now we have to say no to everything in Congress!
“We do,” the MP replied.
Leaders such as Puigdemont himself or his secretary general, Jordi Turull, have been ambiguous in recent days. They insist on demanding from the Government something as difficult to imagine as measures to prevent judges from blocking the amnesty. In his brief intervention in Barcelona, the former president He avoided any criticism of the Executive and focused on a speech shared by many Catalans, including some who deplore Junts’ attitude, to attack the Supreme Court: “A country where amnesty laws do not amnesty has a problem of a democratic nature.”
The Barcelona show and run has not left Puigdemont’s name in a good light within the independence movement. Even among those who went to greet him, the most critical say they feel used and censure the blow dealt to the image of the Mossos, the most refined example of self-government for many Catalans. This resentment was evident on Friday in the appearance of the general commissioner of the force, Eduard Sallent, who stopped giving the fugitive the usual treatment of “president” to reduce him to a simple “Mr. Puigdemont”. A sector of Junts that already opposed the departure of the Government yearns to recover the model of the old Convergència and increasingly considers Puigdemont a burden. But they themselves admit that they are in a minority and that maturing the change will take time. Like so many other things in Catalonia. A business leader underlines this: “Mr. Puigdemont process has died, but the post-process It will still take time.”
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