The Catalan budgets ran aground on the January slope and have not begun to move forward until they have been able to shake hands with the accounts of Barcelona City Council.
Esquerra and the PSC launch a common plan to unblock budgets and mitigate the minority that some suffer in the Generalitat and others in the council.
A pact of interests that leaves Junts per Catalunya out of decision-making.
In public, the Government of the Generalitat maintains that the affairs of each institution should not be mixed, but the acceleration of negotiations to be able to present the 2024 budget before spring has coincided over time with explicit support from Esquerra for the mayor. Jaume Collboni for the initial approval of the Barcelona budgets.
The first secretary of the PSC, Salvador Illa, has indicated that it would “cost him a lot” not to vote on the 2024 Budget of the Generalitat. Junts reproaches the “change of cards” and maintains that the delay that the Government drags in the processing to approve the accounts.
Pere Aragonès' Executive replies that Junts suffers from a lack of collaboration.
“It is very difficult to meet with them,” say Government sources.
Last week's meeting between ERC and Junts, former partners in the Generalitat, was only the second meeting between the respective negotiating teams to explore a possible budget agreement.
The meeting lasted less than 20 minutes.
The negotiations between independentists are not flowing, and the Government is focusing on repeating the agreement with the PSC and the commons that, last year, already made it possible to approve the Catalan accounts.
In Barcelona, the municipal group of Junts was harsh on ERC this Tuesday for having agreed with the PSC.
Councilor Ramon Tremosa recalled the breaches of the pact and blurted out: “ERC has every right to make an agreement, it would only be missing, but it would have to be said before the elections, otherwise electoral fraud occurs and generates disaffection.”
The Government spokesperson, Patrícia Plaja, stated this Tuesday that the 2024 budget project is mature.
“We believe that it is a matter of days before the negotiation reaches a successful conclusion,” she stressed at a press conference after the weekly meeting of the Consell Executiu.
“The Government has fulfilled all the commitments it made to achieve last year's budget agreement, and there would be no reason why we could not repeat the operation,” she added.
For Plaja, it is necessary to approve the accounts "not as an act of generosity to the Government but as an act of responsibility in favor of resources that will benefit all Catalans."
In a plenary session on the drought in Parliament, President
Pere
Aragonès warned that 1,045 million euros depend on budget approval to alleviate water restrictions.
The socialist Salvador Illa, head of the opposition in Catalonia, has admitted that negotiations with ERC for the 2024 Catalan budgets “have intensified in recent weeks.”
Illa claims that the PSC proposes a generous offer to ERC, literally, by offering its support to a minority Government (Esquerra has 33 deputies out of 135 in the Parliament) despite the fact that the socialist list was the most voted in the February elections 2021. “I also don't want the country to pay the consequences of the Government's bad actions,” justifies Illa.
Regarding the Barcelona budget project, he praised the Republicans for “doing an intelligent thing, which is useful politics.”
Last week, Mayor Collboni recalled that “all administrations need budgets,” and without linking them, he noted: “There is a context.
And the context sometimes facilitates, and other times hinders.”
That of the budgets is a negotiation that triggers a domino effect in the Plaza Sant Jaume in Barcelona, the location where the Generalitat and the City Council have their headquarters.
The socialist Jaume Collboni, who governs with 10 councilors out of 41, surpassed this Tuesday the initial approval of the City Council's budgets for 2024 with the favorable votes of ERC, with whom he has agreed on items for 60 million;
and with those of the commons, which have conditioned them to the formation of a tripartite government.
Junts, PP and VOX have voted against.
The vote illustrates the situation in the council, eight months after the elections: a coalition government between the PSC and ERC, who are in harmony, is approaching;
while the common people remember that Collboni is mayor thanks to his votes in the investiture and insist on the need to form a left-wing tripartite.
The green light in the council also provides clarity to unblock the Generalitat's accounts.
Patrícia Plaja assured at a press conference that “considerable progress” is being made.
In addition, the relationship between Esquerra and the PSOE is tightened so that the Republicans give support to the budgets presented by Pedro Sánchez's Executive.
In the investiture pact that Esquerra and the socialists signed for Sánchez's investiture, it was already stated that ERC would give “stability to the legislature” and promised to make the budgets easier.
It was specified that the negotiation had to be “in good faith.”
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