The expansion of El Prat and the nightmare of Catalonia's 10 million euro boom
We didn't have public services and infrastructure sufficiently stressed by the Catalonia of 8 million people and the tourist overcrowding that the Catalan government appears before Parliament to tell us we must prepare for 10 million. Demographic studies say so. It seems the Catalan executive doesn't consider an alternative: demographic studies say so, period. As if demographic studies, and not public policies, decided a country's population.
Some of us still remember when we were 6 million. Even today, surely the best advertising campaign of the restored Catalan government. It was 1987. Thirteen years later, in 2000, we were still 6 million, specifically 6,147,547. In the thirteen years from 1987 to 2000, then, we grew by only 150,000 inhabitants. And in the following thirteen years, from 2000 to 2013, pay attention, we grew by 1,300,000. Did they fall from the sky? From a demographic study? No, politics made very specific decisions, and Catalonia became an intensive source of cheap labor linked to tourism and construction. In 2003, Catalonia offered 494,756 tourist places (beds). Today, it offers more than double that number, 1,217,497. These are official figures. Licenses granted by public administrations based on laws passed by Parliament.
A country's population is the direct consequence of its production and education model. By action and omission, it is politics that has built this Catalonia of 8 million, low wages, touristification, unaffordable housing, and linguistic decline. Now, the same people who brought us here tell us we're getting ready, that this is just the beginning, because we're heading toward 10 million. Considering that Catalans don't have children (1.08 children per woman), you don't have to be very clever to understand how we'll jump from 8 to 10 million inhabitants: by continuing to intensively attract cheap labor from outside the country, that is, by persisting with the current production model. As Guillem Surroca and Jordi Cases, the CUP activists from the Girona regions who have revolutionized social media with their videos of protest, say, "someone has decided we should be the spa of Europe." And, paraphrasing Aznar, we should say that that someone is neither in remote deserts nor in distant mountains. They are found on Via Laietana (Foment del Treball) and in Ciutadella Park (PSC and Junts).
It's the same iron alliance now promoting the expansion of El Prat Airport, a project certainly necessary if we want to finally destroy social cohesion. The official line sounds good: if Catalonia wants to be competitive in the globalized world, it needs more direct air connections with Southeast Asia—here the good commentator should add: "the most economically dynamic region on the planet"—and that requires larger planes that need a longer runway for takeoff and landing. Who can oppose a more competitive country? The problem is that the Aena expansion project isn't about that. The Southeast Asian narrative is merely a public narrative that favors a straightforward expansion of El Prat's capacity from the current 55 million passengers to 70 million, with the addition of a multi-million-dollar urban development project around the airport.
And who will they be, those 15 million more passengers that Aena—a listed company that owes its investors—will be forced to bring to El Prat to make the 3.2 billion euro investment profitable? Senior executives on a professional mission? Who believes this? No, there aren't enough executives for that amount of capacity, and the authors of the speech know it. What they do exist are tourists, millions of tourists who will need hotels and apartments, women who make their beds, waiters who serve them in any way they can, seasonal ice cream parlor and cell phone case shop assistants, fake self-employed VTC drivers, and precariously employed young people who will tear up their tickets to get on the Tu. The system is trained to do this, and this is what it's going to do. The same vicious cycle that has taken us from 6 to 8 million, corrected and increased to reach 10 million, to the greater glory of a minority that's already rubbing its hands. If along the way we permanently destroy social cohesion, completely ruin public services, and finally expel Catalan from Barcelona, it will have been a good thing because we wanted to. The problem here is not Madrid, is Via Laietana and the Ciutadella Park.
