Assumptions: Catalonia is not (quite) Spain
BarcelonaIn terms of budgets, it could be said that Catalonia is not (really) Spain. The balance of parliamentary forces will allow for them before summer. Specifically, so that they can be approved by Parliament in July. It only remains for ERC, which has convened a national council for Monday, to give it the go-ahead. The situation is perceived in the happy faces of some government members, especially the Minister of Economy, Alícia Romero.
For a few days now, the music coming from Plaça Sant Jaume and that of the Republicans has been harmonizing. In Catalonia, after repeating the formula of the credit supplement –used by ERC to mark its position without breaking and provoking elections– the combinations are not as complicated as in the Congress of Deputies, where Junts moves away from the pragmatism of the old Convergència and Pedro Sánchez has to gather many more supports.
If not, just ask the vice president and minister of Economy, Carlos Cuerpo, who gave a conference last Wednesday at the return of the Cercle Financer, now organized by CaixaBank instead of its main shareholder, the Fundació La Caixa. With Miquel Roca –president of the other organizer, the Societat Econòmica Barcelonesa d'Amics del País– as interviewer, Cuerpo maintained his calm tone. So much so that, according to Roca, everyone left "calmer" after hearing him. And more so, after answering a question about whether the political climate is the most conducive to consensus, with a whisper from the audience. He wanted to send a positive message: "Despite the broad political spectrum, there is room for a common landing zone," he said.
Another thing is to know if there will be state budgets or if the legislature will end without them. In the brief question and answer session (there were only two), the businessman Josep Lluís Rovira, after praising the vice president as an introduction, shot: "What would you think of a company that had gone four years without budgets". With great capacity for response, Cuerpo, after joking, assured that the central executive is trying to work on "the most realistic scenario possible to create the most realistic budget project possible (...) When there is more certainty about the war and we know where inflation is heading, which affects many items linked to it, such as pensions"... In short, the possibilities of state budgets are very few, unlike those of the Generalitat, if nothing goes wrong.
