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The perimeter confinement leaves Andorra locked up and without half of its income

2020-11-28T02:56:17.554Z


The closure with France and Catalonia interrupts the visits of tourists and the family ties of thousands of citizens


A woman waits next to the window of a Duty Free in Andorra la Vella.Albert Garcia / EL PAÍS

Andorra is once again closed in its mountains.

This small country of 77,000 inhabitants has been without half of its economic income since October, from tourism.

The perimeter confinements decreed in France and Catalonia have left the great bazaar of the Pyrenees without visitors.

The cross-border family ties of thousands of its citizens have also been broken, people like Puri López, who suffers from the longing of not being able to visit their grandchildren on weekends in Tarragona.

López and her colleagues, nurses, ask the journalist when mobility restrictions will be lifted to enter Spain.

They know that there is no possible shortcut, the controls of the Mossos de Esquadra on the other side of the border are daily.

They trust that an agreement between the Government of Andorra and the Generalitat will again allow travel before the scheduled date, December 21.

The two parties are negotiating an alternative, according to the Andorran executive.

Meanwhile, only those who have proof of work, health or care for dependents can cross the border, such as the 1,500 residents of nearby Seu d'Urgell (Lleida) who work in Andorra.

The mayor of La Seu, Jordi Fàbrega, estimates that one in four families in the municipality have been affected by the interruption of mobility.

López is a member of one of the medical teams that carry out covid-19 TMA molecular detection tests to the population in different parts of the region every day.

The Government estimates that on average 10% of the inhabitants test each week.

These massive screenings are what make the number of positives in Andorra so high, defends the head of Government, Xavier Espot: if the cumulative incidence per 100,000 inhabitants in Spain was 374.5 positives on 24 November, that of Andorra, with the data available for November 16, was 1,322.

The diagnostic tests per 100,000 inhabitants of Andorra were four times higher than those of Spain.

In the parliamentary plenary session on budgets last week, Josep Pintat, leader of the opposition group Tercera Vía, warned that Andorra "is more isolated than ever" and that "the evolution of the pandemic is out of control".

Enrique Orera is from Zaragoza and has been in Andorra for 14 years.

He, his wife and his two daughters went last Monday to the mobile testing laboratory for COVID-19 installed in a car park in Andorra la Vella.

One of the girls had tested positive and the rest of the family, without getting out of the car, underwent the test.

At the moment they must be confined at home for ten days.

Orera works in the installation of billboards, his wife is a civil servant.

Both maintain their employment and praise the Government's action in the face of the pandemic, but Orera is convinced that when the grace period for the Temporary Employment Regulation (ERTE) ends, many residents will choose to return to their place of origin, because in Andorra there is no unemployment benefit and life is more expensive.

Espot assures that they are still not detecting a loss of residents, as it did in the economic crisis that broke out in 2008, thanks to the social measures they have introduced.

However, Óscar Cardoso, a construction worker, warns that many of his Portuguese compatriots without employment are already returning to their country - the Portuguese community is, after the Spanish, the largest among the foreign population of Andorra.

The ski resorts, another great attraction in Andorra, have reduced their workforce by 35% for this season, explains Montse Guerrero, director of the Association of Ski Resorts of Andorra.

Luck is played with the end of the perimeter confinement in Catalonia before Christmas.

At the moment they believe that they will have lost practically the entire foreign market other than the French and Spanish –the latter contributes 50% of the market–, and that last season it represented 33% of users.

"It is morally exhausting to spend eight hours a day without knowing if someone is coming in today," says Lluís Gaspar, a clerk for twenty years at the electronics store Orly, in Andorra la Vella, the capital.

65% of the establishment's income, foreign customers, have disappeared, and at the moment of four employees, two are in the ERTE.

"Andorra without tourism is dead", explain Rosana Brun and her husband.

Since the restaurant reopened on November 17, its restaurant La casa del grill has had a maximum of six people a day.

In August, when the Andorran mountains reached a record level of overnight stays, after the first confinement and with the destinations of the Pyrenees on the rise, La casa del grill had 120 daily customers.

Brun and her husband want to transfer the restaurant because they don't even know how they will be able to pay the rent for the premises.

Joan Micó, director of the Center for Sociological Research of Andorra (CRES), emphasizes that the border is a presence that determines Andorran people, a people that already lives in orographic seclusion.

“The queues at customs were synonymous with prosperity.

The way of understanding the border has changed.

It's as if a tourist town like Salou was suddenly closed ”.

The CRES presented in September, together with the Andorran Chamber of Commerce, a study in which only 3% of the surveyed businessmen had planned to liquidate their business, and 12% were considering it.

Micó warns that the numbers may have worsened because the survey was conducted in summer, when there was a momentary economic recovery.

“In surveys we detected that there was a feeling that the threat had passed.

Perhaps society was not aware of the danger.

It is a lesson in our fragility ”.

Patricia Guasch, co-owner of Les 1000 Pipes, remembers summer as a mirage of bonanza.

She has lost most of her clientele and the upcoming opening of the borders does not reassure her: her main fear, she admits, is that a new wave of the epidemic will be unleashed in January and it will mean closing her store for good.

Social Democrats ask to raise taxes

The executive has made an unprecedented effort in Andorra in social measures and the reinforcement of health.

This has been possible, according to the head of Government, Xavier Espot, because the level of indebtedness of the public coffers was only 34% of GDP.

The contemplated deficit will now be 43%.

The main opposition formation, the Social Democratic Party (PS), demands that taxes be raised for the highest incomes - the maximum income tax bracket is 10% -, an option that the ruling coalition considers unnecessary.

The PS cites the recommendations of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to compensate the public effort in the face of the crisis with an increase in the tax burden for the richest.

Andorra became a member of the IMF last October, and in June it became a full member of the Development Bank of the Council of Europe.

Espot emphasizes that the emergence of the pandemic has accelerated these international alliances, and that the next step should be for the Association Agreement with the European Union to materialize.

It was precisely another crisis, after several tax fraud scandals and an investigation by the United States, which accelerated Andorra to undertake a series of reforms to leave the list of tax havens in 2018.

Information about the coronavirus

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- Guide to action against the disease

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2020-11-28

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