The Popular Party (PP) categorically rejects special and privileged funding for Catalonia. At the beginning of the political year, the president of the government, the socialist Pedro Sánchez, promised to flood the autonomous communities with funds to silence criticism of the Catalan quota, but the people do not buy the bluff. The party’s secretary general, Cuca Gamarra, urged the head of the Executive to convene the Conference of Presidents to address “together” the budget policy and the migration crisis.
Sánchez, in a speech in which he did not allow questions to be asked to the media, proposed meeting bilaterally with each regional president to address the financing problems of their respective communities individually. This is rejected by the PP, which specifies that this issue must be addressed multilaterally and without allowing, in any case, Catalonia to leave the common regime and have its own tax agency.
Gamarra made statements on the terrace of the PP national headquarters, at number 13 of Génova Street in Madrid, and concluded that the credibility of President Sánchez’s word “is worthless”. Likewise, he criticized the explanations proposed in the Senate, forced by the people, by the first vice-president and Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, and regretted that the government compares “the privileges” that it wants to grant to Catalonia in exchange for the investiture of Salvador Illa with the taxation of Cuenca, Teruel and Soria to alleviate depopulation.
This Wednesday, the PP is holding a meeting in Genoa before the one that its leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, will hold on Friday with his regional presidents in Madrid. Gamarra met with his regional advisers from the Presidency and the Treasury to discuss with them Friday’s meeting, in which the popular party seeks to claim its unity in financing and to affirm that the PP governs in twelve of the seventeen autonomous communities. cities, in addition to the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla. The Vice-Secretary for Autonomous and Local Coordination, Elías Bendodo, and the Vice-Secretary for Economy, Juan Bravo, also participated.
“We must decide together about the future of Spain,” said Gamarra, who regretted that, until now, the PSOE has also been opposed to the creation of an economic agreement in Catalonia – the government speaks of “singular financing”, but the agreement implies the transfer of the collection and management of all taxes – and he has abandoned this position so that, he says, “Pedro Sánchez continues as president and one of his own is at the head of the Generalitat.”
Request since November
Since November, the PP has been unsuccessfully demanding the convening of the Conference of Presidents, but it continues to try. Beyond regional funding, the people are asking that this forum be used to jointly seek solutions to the migration crisis in Spain, with a special focus on the Canary Islands. The PSOE criticizes the PP for voting against the reform of the immigration law in July, with which the executive sought to make the distribution of unaccompanied foreign minors between the different regions mandatory, but the popular insists that the solution must come from the hands of the territorial leaders.
