Diagnosis, therapy and hope

Today marks two years since Salvador Illa was invested as President of the Generalitat. His investiture speech – his government program – was overshadowed by the fleeting appearance of President Puigdemont in the public sphere, but it is worth reviewing.This is a well-constructed speech, characterized by the promise of rigor and goodwill. It does not avoid referencing the country's problems – poverty, educational outcomes, declining wages, rising housing costs, weak infrastructure to face the climate challenge, etc. – but it does not include a diagnosis; Illa stated that educational outcomes were poor, that wages were low, and that housing was inaccessible for too many people, but at no point did he explain why.It is not surprising, therefore, that it is impossible to find the proposed therapy in that discourse, even though it can be guessed that it was about putting more money into public services, boosting economic growth (“brave decisions for Catalonia to gain weight”) and administering with consensus (“governing for everyone”, “dialogue with everyone”, “agreement with municipalities and civil society”, “ambition but pragmatism”, “agree whenever possible”, etc.)The practical materialization of those ideas turned out to be the "Catalonia leads" plan, presented half a year later. The central idea was the boosting of economic growth, and, in fact, the reference to "leading" seemed to refer to the objective that Catalonia's GDP would once again surpass that of Madrid, as the sorpasso was being poorly digested by local elites. Two years after the investiture speech, it is difficult not to reach the conclusion that the applied therapy is proving to be wrong: Catalonia continues to grow very rapidly economically, but not only are public housing, healthcare, and education worse than two years ago, but everything indicates that in two years' time they will have worsened, as the population continues to grow at a much higher rate than the capacity of these services to respond: does anyone doubt that the PISA results for 2025 would have been worse than those for 2022 if schools had excluded only 5% of students? Regarding the Rodalies service – the fourth pillar of the welfare state that has been failing – although work is being done on it, a large part of the investments are not being concentrated on strengthening the service but on burying urban tracks, and what will remain to be done when the current 2020-2030 plan ends will be much more than what will have been done.

It goes without saying that the country needs a government with an accurate diagnosis of its problems and that, based on this, proposes to apply effective therapy. However, assuming that from now on Illa gets the diagnosis and therapy right, it would also not be possible for the public services that have been in disarray to significantly improve in the two years of the legislature that he has left. Illa asks the citizens for "time and patience", and he is right to do so, because the problems are enormous, but he should know that only those who have hope grant time, and now the citizens have none.Throughout his speech, Illa announced that he wanted to lead "the third transformation of Catalonia", specifying that the first began with the return of President Tarradellas and the second with the investiture of President Maragall. If anything characterizes those historic moments, it was the hope of the Catalans. Hope for what? A simple answer is: to be like the Europeans. Today, Catalans have the feeling that we are moving away from Europe, and the data confirm this: if throughout the second half of the 20th century we converged with it, since the beginning of the 21st century we have been diverging. To be more precise: we are globalizing and Barcelona in particular has become part of the network of European cities, but this process has been accompanied by a relative worsening of the standard of living of the average Catalan.Let's consider the level of rents: a one-bedroom dwelling, both in the center of Barcelona and in its outskirts, has a comparable rent to equivalents in Paris, Munich, or Copenhagen (around €1,500 in the first case and around €1,100 in the second). On the other hand, the average salary of a Barcelonian is only two-thirds of that of the average citizen of other cities (the proportion is the same if we compare ourselves to Zurich, only there rents are double and salaries more than triple those of Catalans): we have converged in real estate prices, but not in salaries.In this context, can Illa ask Catalans to be patient because his program will lead us – once again – to converge with Europe?I fear that to convince us will require much more than promises of dialogue, consensus, pacts, and other good intentions of the like.