The former president of the Junta de Andalucía José Antonio Griñán hcriticized the use of the agreement between the Party of Socialists of Catalonia (PSC) and the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) andIn terms of financing, which allowed the investiture of Salvador Illa as president of the Generalitat, to “strike” the Spanish government or express “Catalanphobia”.
This is expressed in an article that he signs with the former Andalusian Minister of the Treasury Carmen Martínez Aguayo (between 2009 and 2010), published this Sunday on elcorreoweb.es and entitled “Singularity and equality”. In this sense, a direct reference is made to the text on the financing of Catalonia, included in point 2 of the agreement between the two political formations and to the “endless opinions and debates” raised.
“The majority of them have gone beyond the literal framework of the pact and some have entered a swampy terrain from which it is always easier to enter than to exit.” In this sense, they recall that “our constituents have left open the configuration of the territorial model based on a fundamental asymmetry whose development, from the bottom up, should be done through the respective statutes of the communities.”
Statutes that would be “negotiated bilaterally” between the corresponding autonomy and the Cortes Generales, “without their regulation having to be uniform” – he maintains -, so that the singularity and bilaterality “were at the beginning of the configuration of autonomous Spain and remain principles in force today.
The authors of the article advise “to exercise caution and to be attentive to its evolution” since the text – they say – is “deliberately ambiguous”, Without this, “it is now a matter of avoiding certain doubts that could lead to fruitful debates.” In this regard, “it seems to us unnecessarily alarmist to use the agreement as a weapon to strike the central government or as a pretext to express Catalanophobia, for which only those who suffer from this disease are responsible.”
confederal model
According to him, this agreement does not seem to “lead us to a confederal state model, unless we believe that we are already there at the moment.”“s singularities of the Basque Country, Navarre and the Canary Islands”. Regarding the project of a new single financing model for Catalonia, they point out that “part of the existence of a historical underfunding of this autonomous community, a debatable question This must be solved with data rather than rigged debates and foul words.”
“The project is not a manual of grievances and we believe it is important to emphasize that it does not start from fiscal balances to reach a certain fiscal deficit in Catalonia, as happened at the beginning of the “trial” with this error of “Spain”. “We are robbed”, which is not very different from what currently exists in Catalonia, they are trying to rob us”, adds the text.
The article emphasizes that “there is no identity between the system announced in the agreement and the Basque concert system.” They put forward several reasons for this, among others that, unlike what was established for Euskadi, the Catalan agreement “respects the original power to set state taxes (art. 133.1. of the CE), a competence that they consider can continue to be transferred as it has been until now, and proposes to assume the management of the collection, settlement and control of state taxes in Catalonia, which is provided for in article 206 of the Catalan Statute of 2006.
References to the status of autonomy
The former Andalusian president recalls that the Andalusian Statute of 2007 also provides, in its article 181.2, a state delegation to create a “single tax administration in Andalusia”, while warning that the possibility of reaching this single Agency in Catalonia or Andalusia would only be possible “on condition of first starting from a consortium that guarantees the active presence of the AEAT in the Territorial Fiscal Agency”.
Likewise, the article highlights that all financing models have arisen from bilateral relations between the State and the respective autonomous communities “without there having been a multilateral decision-making body, as a constitutionally reformed Senate should have been.” At this point, it highlights thatThe Fiscal and Financial Policy Council is an advisory bodyivo “in which the voice of the president, Minister of Finance, is equal to the sum of all the votes of the councilors.”
The Conference of Presidents, “which is a good forum for debate, also has no chance of reaching agreements.” because these require unanimity. And finally, in the continuity of bilaterality, it must be remembered that the Catalan agreement “gives an important role to the Joint State-Generalitat Commission for Economic and Fiscal Affairs, an organism that is no different from other similar organisms created in different autonomous communities.
Solidarity
Solidarity is another of the issues raised in the article, since Catalonia’s contribution in this regard “must be explicit and reflected in a transparent manner” and it is added that “it must contribute to solidarity with the other autonomous communities, something equally indisputable. This solidarity “must be limited by the principle of ordinality, a highly debatable issue that could only be acceptable if it were assumed that financing resources alone should not modify the ranking of GDP per capita”. “In any case, It is not the PSC-ERC pact that must guarantee equality, but the Spanish government.” concludes the article.
