The leader of the PP, Alberto Nuñez Feijooand the 14 barons of the autonomous communities and cities in which they govern (70% of the Spanish territorial map) conspired this Friday in Madrid in an “all in one” to reject the Catalan quota, give up “deceptive bilaterality” with which Pedro Sánchez wants to treat them and demand an injection of 18 billion of European funds that the central executive has not implemented.
The PP leader and his territorial barons have demonstrated a common front against the singular financing of Catalonia agreed between the PSOE and ERC invest the socialist Salvador Illa President of the Generalitat. An image of unity – immortalized in a family photo – with which the popular They also want to show the division that exists among the PSOE barons in this regard, as is the case with the critics. Emiliano Garcia-Page (Castile-La Mancha) and Javier Lamban (Aragon).
At the meeting, under the motto Spain We are allheld at Palace of the Dukes of Pastrana -place where Napoleon stayed when he passed through Madrid during the War of Independence-, 10 regional presidents of the PP, the presidents of Ceuta and Melilla, the vice-president of the Canary Islands and the vice-president of the Balearic Islands attended, from the head of the Balearic government, Marga Prohenswas unable to travel to Madrid due to the Government Council and a ceremony to open the school year.
The national leadership of the PP has thwarted with this format – agreed in Cordoba last March – the Conference of Presidents that Pedro Sanchez has not met since March 2022 and that the popular They have been complaining for months. In fact, before the summer, all the PP barons sent a letter to the head of the Executive demanding the urgent convening of the said Conference of Presidents to discuss issues such as: autonomous financing and migration crisis and they threatened to take him to court if he did not set a date. For now, Sánchez has only announced that this meeting will take place in the coming months in Santander (Cantabria), with housing as the main theme.
Regarding Sánchez’s intention to meet with the regional presidents of the PP in Moncloa in “bilateral meetings”, Feijóo and his team arrive at this conclave with a common position in line with what was expressed this Thursday by the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Diaz AyusoThe barons will not meet with Sánchez in Moncloa or with the government to discuss regional financing, but in the “multilateral” forums provided for this purpose, such as the aforementioned Conference of Presidents and the Fiscal and Financial Policy Council. For other issues, such as infrastructure, they will go to the Moncloa Palace if Sánchez calls them, because they have been asking and waiting for some time to be received by the head of the Executive. In the case of the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, this decision has not been made.
In this sense, and after the meeting held behind closed doors, it is expected that all the barons will sign a document of conclusions of this summit against the attempt at “division” that the government of Pedro Sánchez seeks with its project to extend the “single financing” of Catalonia to other communities.
“Arbitrary meetings”
Concretely, in this text “they totally condemn the trick of bilaterality with the separatists with whom the Spanish government intends to camouflage its determination to build a country with first and second class citizens,” popular sources indicate, while committing to “not breaking multilaterality in any case.”
“Both the updating of the system and any issue related to it must be addressed together, through democratic means, to guarantee equality for all Spaniards in access to public services: not through arbitrary meetings“at the discretion of the central government and behind closed doors, but in legally constituted forums,” the document says, according to PP sources.
