It's now time to accelerate and form a government
Finally one of the unknowns of the new legislature has been solved and Laura Borràs has opted to become Parliament Speaker instead of vice-president of the Government. The agreement, however, was not closed until Thursday afternoon, a few hours before the start of the constitutive session of the new Parliament. It is the first major agreement between the three pro-independence forces - or at least between the two main ones, because it is not clear that the CUP will vote for Borràs - since the February 14 elections. A month has passed, then, and as for the important pact, that of the new government, everything is still to be done. In fact, during these weeks there have been repeated episodes of tension and mutual reproaches between the three parties, when they themselves had pledged to change the dynamics to ensure the smooth running of the new executive.
Yet the precedent the negotiation for the Parliamentary Bureau does not invite optimism, with CUP and Junts fighting over it and the latter waiting until the very last moment to make their candidate public. Negotiations need to be more agile, because the country urgently needs a strong and cohesive executive. And a way must be found to overcome the mistrust that weighed down the last legislature. This Thursday, for example, there has been the good news of Meritxell Serret's return to Catalonia but once again it seems that Junts did not know anything about it. It would be good if in such strategic matters as this the degree of coordination between the two parties were higher.
In any case, it is now time to speed up the process of agreeing on the programme and the composition of the new government between ERC and Junts. The strategy regarding the Independence bid must be agreed, but so must the structure of the executive, which has to adapt to the new context of health emergency and economic reconstruction, and an ambitious but realistic sectoral government programme. The aim should be to have an investiture within two weeks and the government in power by Easter. This is why it would be necessary to negotiate all aspects in parallel and not get bogged down by the most contentious points.
As for Parliament, the agreement to minimise the role of Vox in the chamber signed by the PSC, ERC, Junts, the CUP and En Comú is good news. This will surely be one of the challenges for the new president, who already has experience in the Spanish Parliament and knows perfectly well what the methods of the far right are. Borràs will have to defend the right of the chamber to raise all political debates, under the right to freedom of expression and political participation, and at the same time ensure that the legal initiatives that the Government approves to improve the lives of the people come to fruition. The Parliament has to be a reflection of the ideological pluralism of the country, and at the same time an instrument that should by perceived by all citizens as useful for their interests. In this sense, the presidency of the Parliament shares one thing with that of the Generalitat: as the main institutions of the country, the people who embody them must also represent the citizens as a whole.
