Paralysis and scoundrels
1. I suspected the situation was serious. And I decided to document it. I wondered when Spain, Catalonia, and Barcelona started living with extended budgets. Spain is just getting by on the 2023 budget. Catalonia is also barely surviving on the 2023 budget. Barcelona, for its part, is just scraping by with the budget approved in May 2024 thanks to a special procedure: a vote of confidence. The paralysis, therefore, is threefold and affects all areas. For three years now, so to speak, the planned structural spending—on healthcare, education, social services, and civil servants' salaries—has been maintained, but new programs and structural investments cannot be implemented. Extending the budget means ensuring that, administratively, the country doesn't grind to a halt, but neither does it improve in any way. It's a death sentence. Projects, infrastructure, and, consequently, the citizens suffer. And that's how things are going for us, for example, with doctors protesting a new agreement, teachers in the streets, and commuter trains at a standstill. But let's take it one step at a time.
2. Pedro Sánchez failed to pass a national budget in either 2024 or 2025, and it seems unlikely he will in 2026 either. The Catalan government is still operating under the last budget passed by Pere Aragonès, thanks to the votes of Esquerra Republicana, the PSC, and Comuns, in 2020 and 2021. Unable to reach an agreement with those same parties, or with others that would guarantee a majority, Aragonès resigned and elections were called. Those expansionary budgets that were shelved in 2024 would have greatly benefited health, education, housing, and culture—the Catalan government's department, which continues to work tirelessly to finally reach the 2% target for allocating these areas to the country's total spending. The PSC won the elections, but Salvador Illa also leads a minority government, similar to Pedro Sánchez's in Spain or Jaume Collboni's in Barcelona. Socialism everywhere, but without any majority to allow them to breathe and pass any significant improvements anywhere.
3. Governing in a minority means this: having to make deals with other parties that have a different ideology or priorities than your own. This shifting balance forces governments, but also opposition parties, to compromise on certain issues to reach agreements that seek the common good and benefit 100% of citizens, regardless of their voting intentions, or even if they prefer to stay home and never cast a ballot. However, we are stuck in a perverse world of black and white. Sectarian, radical, and red-line policies wear down the government in power, but they are a form of social suicide born of immeasurable irresponsibility. Nobody wins. On the contrary, everyone loses. Parties act more to undermine each other than to consider the good of the people. And this short-sighted and poisonous approach goes unpunished. Parties should be told: you can squabble all you want with each other, but you are obligated to pass a budget.
4. This lack of understanding of our kaleidoscope of political parties leads me to point them out, without exception, as shameless. In Spain, shame has been completely lost, and there, the only word they have is... scoundrelLittle to nothing. If we're lacking in morality here, in Madrid they don't have a shred left. They always want more of everything. Even with language. In this case, the political parties are the exact sum of scoundrels and... shamelessWe elected them to manage public affairs and improve our lives, not to stagnate them with maximalist positions aimed solely at undermining those in power. In the long run, what goes around comes around.