Salvador Illa wants to lay the foundations of the Catalonia of the future with a formula from the past. The president of the Generalitat has claimed the great parliamentary agreements that marked the legislatures of Jordi Pujol and has asked for a broad consensus on the objectives of his mandate, among which he has highlighted the improvement of the financing agreed with ERC. “Catalonia does not want to be more or less than anyone else,” the new head of government has set as a framework for the legislative body.
The president appeared this Thursday in Parliament to report on the appointments of the advisers of his new government. After the noise (for various reasons) that the new financing model has generated in Barcelona, Madrid and the rest of the autonomies, Illa wanted to calm both his pro-independence investiture partners and the most critical voices in the rest of Spain with the new financing.
The formula found by the president to try to square the circle was to guarantee that the pact with the ERC will be respected and that Catalonia will maintain its solidarity with the autonomies with fewer resources. “The financing agreement will be respected. I know that it will cost a lot, but it will be achieved,” Illa first affirmed, before recalling that Catalonia “is in solidarity and will continue to be so.”
How to get it? Illa’s path is that of the great agreements that marked the deployment of the welfare state in Catalonia in the legislatures of Jordi Pujol, when convergents and socialists, and sometimes the PSUC, agreed on key issues such as linguistic immersion, the health system or infrastructure.
“Wouldn’t it be better to accept all this? Wouldn’t it be better if we agreed on health and education policies for the next 15 years and committed to another government having a common road map?” “Isn’t that how Catalonia progressed in the 80s and 90s?” stressed the president, who reached out to the Junts, the CUP and the PP, in addition to the ERC and the Comuns, the two parties that facilitated his investiture.
Illa found little provision in Junts, which has harshly inaugurated its role in the opposition, in line with the complications in which the people of Puigdemont want to put the government of Pedro Sánchez. The neoconvergent spokesman, Albert Batet, accused the new president of “giving priority to the Moncloa to the detriment of Parliament.”
