The agreement that the Socialist Party reached with ERC to obtain the investiture of Salvador Illa as president of the Generalitat of Catalonia has placed the issue of regional financing at the centre of the political debate. Many voices criticise the fact that a single financing of Catalonia would violate the principle of equality. Certainly, the Spanish reality has suffered for four decades from the defects of a Constitution that does not define the territorial system. In this lack of definition, it is impossible to close the debate on our autonomous model. However, behind the invocation of equality hides a lot of populism.
In a democracy, equality is never a point of arrival, but only a starting point. We do not want to be all the same, but rather to be truly free to decide how different we will be. Only the most absurd dictatorships offer the horizon of an egalitarian society in which everyone dresses the same, owns the same goods or thinks the same way. In a democracy, it is quite the opposite. Our value is diversity, which is the only possible result of the exercise of freedom. Equality is only the precondition for freedom to be real. To really have the power to decide, we should all start from a similar situation.
