It has been ten years since a president of the Generalitat of Catalonia visited the king at the Palace of La Zarzuela. Salvador Illa This Wednesday he broke this terrible habit and met Philip VI in private after posing for press photographers.
The meeting raised logical expectations. In Catalonia, over the last decade, exceptionalism has been the norm and normality the exception. But the current president of the Generalitat seems willing to bring Catalonia back to the path of minimal institutional courtesy. That is, on the path to mutual respect between state institutions.
This is not the only gesture made by Salvador Illa in this regard. On August 23, the President of the Generalitat recovered the Spanish flag, which he placed next to the Catalan and European flags, for his meeting with the Mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni.
Six days later, on August 29, Illa welcomed the Spanish monarch for the first time in Barcelona, where Felipe VI had arrived to preside over the opening ceremony of the Sailing America’s Cup. and visit the renovated facilities of the Olympic Port of the Catalan capital.
Again, this has not been the norm in Catalonia over the last decade. Carles Puigdemont, Quim Torra either Father Aragonèsand even Ada Colauhave always avoided the king and refused to meet him or even greet him.
Salvador Illa has very serious challenges to face. The economic, social and cultural decline of Catalonia is not a self-serving distortion of reality, but reality itself. Thousands of businesses have fled Catalonia, the tax burden is the most suffocating in all of Spain, insecurity in the streets is much higher than in other communities and educational results are the worst in the country. The demoralization and disorientation of citizens, after a decade of processit is undeniable.
Illa, who has repeatedly claimed the legacy of Joseph Tarradellasparticularly with regard to his efforts to unite political Catalanism around an idea of Catalonia compatible with the feeling of belonging to Spain, So he started his career as president on the right foot..
Before him are obstacles such as the Catalan concert, which contradicts two of the fundamental principles of the social democracy to which he belongs: that of the equality of all citizens and that of the solidarity redistribution of resources from the richest communities to the poorest.
That of the Catalan language too, which cannot become a language imposed on the Catalans under the pretext of its protection.
Or that of TV-3 and Catalunya Ràdio, which today only represent a minority of Catalans.
But above all, Salvador Illa faces the challenge of reestablishing the relations of fraternity between Catalan citizens and the rest of Spain, which the pro-independence parties have blown up in the last decade. Once these networks of affection are reestablished, the rest, including the economy of a community that could not survive isolated from the rest of Spain, will come by itself.
Salvador Illa got off to a good start in the symbolic field. Now it is time to translate these gestures into real policy..
