How to negotiate with the State?

The event that brought together the current Minister of Economy and three former ministers, held on Monday at the College of Economists of Catalonia, and which this newspaper reported on Tuesday, was a ray of hope due to the common ground expressed by politicians from different parties who can achieve broad majorities.

Catalonia has emerged from the negotiation on regional financing with the central government with some promises, but at a significant cost: the lynching suffered from the rest of the autonomous communities, which has been eroding the gains obtained. Catalan negotiations with Madrid are always open, both due to the interest of the Catalan side and that of the other autonomous communities, which is always hostile, especially the more they gain from it. This need for Catalonia's submission is exhausting. We always envy the capacity and possibility of the Basque parties to conduct negotiations that are as ambitious or more so, with great discretion and with results that are not disputed within Spain. They are seen as inevitable, quite the opposite of what happens with Catalonia, where there is always the danger that what has been gained will be consolidated for everyone, which perpetuates the Catalan grievance and its fiscal deficit.

The convergence of viewpoints between the current minister, Alícia Romero, and the ministers Antoni Castells, Jaume Giró, and Natàlia Mas, who represented a broad majority of the current Parliament and, in general, of previous Catalan Parliaments, was comforting, but it leads to reflection on why we do not achieve better results in our relationship with the State. There are many well-known causes. Let us remember that Catalonia has lost all the confrontations it has historically had with the State, while Euskadi has achieved explicit or implicit peace treaties that have left a legacy of institutional specificity and self-government that we greatly envy from Catalonia.

I propose some points on which a strong synergy could be built between the parties that were indirectly represented at the CEC round table.

Negotiate whenever the arithmetic of the Congress of Deputies allows it. Do not repeat the errors that led to the Catalan retraction in the fall of 2010, to Catalan isolation after the two elections of 2015 and 2016, and to the opportunity of the 2019 budgetary negotiation. Occasions widely seized by the Basque parties.Always increase the number of positions in the superior corps of the Generalitat: tax inspectors, lawyers of the Generalitat, comptrollers and senior technicians in general. The Generalitat suffers from a permanent shortage of personnel in these corps, as it always prioritizes the hiring of personnel for finalist public services and forgets to reinforce the superior corps, which generates a notable technical weakness at critical moments of negotiations (Madrid is always stronger) and for undertaking new projects, such as the expansion of the ATC, for example – but not only.Always jointly select the investments to negotiate with the State, whether they are Commuter Rail, airport, highways, or other infrastructures. The negotiation cannot happen if there are insurmountable internal divisions. My priority would be Commuter Rail, for others the airport, but what is needed, above all, are consensuses on priorities. Seek, whenever publicly negotiated, the support and complicity of other autonomous communities. This can be effective when it comes to taking into account the costs of tourism (whose negative externalities we talk so much about) in regional financing models. Probably non-tourist autonomous communities must view tourism with great envy, but tourist communities together can do a lot to combat this prejudice and assert the enormous unfunded costs they suffer, in addition to the reduction in living standards (tendency to reduce per capita GDP).Seek the support of other autonomous communities – not always the same ones – that have higher purchasing power parities (PPPs) than the state average. Since this particularity, so central to the use of public resources, is not included in the regional financing models, the nominal income obtained is worth less than that obtained by communities with below-average PPPs.Always share self-criticism about the barriers that from Catalonia itself we place on economic growth (GDP per capita, not GDP), such as hostility to nuclear power plants, to all kinds of renewable energies (solar and wind, but not only), to very high voltage lines, to the planning of transport infrastructures and, in general, to large investments. Surely there are differences of criteria, but it is difficult to believe that there cannot be sufficiently broad agreements on how to prioritize large investments, how to negotiate them with the State, and how to eliminate excessive procedural barriers.