The management that Illa would not want to do

On November 1, 2010, Mas won the elections to the Parliament of Catalonia with enough force to govern. The next day, ARA dedicated its front page to "the new president's agenda": 1) Streamline the administration, 2) Abolish the inheritance tax, 3) Renegotiate the debt of the Generalitat, 4) Rebuild and complete the Quart Cinturó, 5) Eliminate the 80 km/h speed limit. In popular language, we distinguish between politicians who intend to change the world and those who want to limit themselves to "managing". To make ourselves understood, the former want to approve same-sex marriage and the latter want trains to arrive on time; the former want to change the educational system and the latter want the school year to start on the scheduled date and with full staffing. Mas presented himself as a manager who would bring order after the two left-wing tripartites, which would have been characterized by decisions that held the country back. He also considered – very much in line with a neoliberal ideology that was in better health than it is today – that the Catalan government's accounts could be balanced by cutting unnecessary expenses.Mas failed, it goes without saying: fifteen years later, the Catalan administration has not slimmed down, both the inheritance tax and the 80 km/h on the Barcelona accesses remain in force, the Quart Cinturó is still under construction and we are awaiting the forgiveness of 15% of the FLA debt. Discontent devoured him, and he ended up leading an independence movement in which he did not believe. A movement that – it should be remembered – began with a chaos in the Rodalies service, five years before the start of the Procés.

Illa also won the elections, two years ago, with an agenda of a manager willing to bring order after independentist governments. Leaving aside some very specific points, the 2024-2027 government plan could be signed by any moderate political force in any country: more affordable housing, green reindustrialization, responsible water management, social equity, better public services, efficient public administration... Illa himself summarized his project with the slogan "No miracles, with work." Like Mas, Illa thought that common sense and order were enough to tidy things up. In particular – and through his super-minister Dalmau – he also attached great importance to the streamlining of the administration.Unfortunately, discontent also threatens to devour Illa: halfway through the legislature, access to housing is worse than ever, teaching staff have entered a spiral of tension in which the unions themselves are being disavowed by their members, and healthcare staff have initiated a similar dynamic. Regarding the Rodalies service, improvements will necessarily be very slow. Furthermore, everything indicates that the education crisis will end up being resolved with salary increases and more hirings, which will create a dynamic extendable to the rest of public services, starting with care (which employs the lowest-paid staff), without the citizen experiencing significant improvements. On the other hand, the dynamics of politics in Madrid could abort the new regional financing and deprive the Generalitat of an increase in resources that many in Catalonia consider insufficient, but which Illa is already counting on.I have a lot of sympathy for rulers who consider their main mission to be managing. There is no irony: I have a lot of sympathy for them. But the times we live in demand something else.

Both Mas and Illa wanted to ignore the elephant in the room. When Mas won the elections, Catalonia had already gained 1.3 million new inhabitants, all entitled to housing, healthcare, education, and a thousand more public services; now there are 2 million. For reasons of collective psychology that would be difficult to figure out, we tend not to want to relate the housing, education, and healthcare crisis to population growth. But the fact that we prefer not to relate one thing to another does not prevent the causal relationship from being obvious.It is also obvious – when the matter is considered dispassionately – that the dynamic of deterioration we are experiencing cannot be addressed solely by measures to make public administration more agile, by building affordable housing (at a necessarily insufficient pace), or by adding more educational and health personnel. Mas wanted to divert the discontent towards Madrid and lead it. In the end, it did not go well for him, nor for Catalonia. Illa believes he can control a discontent that, for the moment, he could not divert to Madrid either. We hope that, before doing any nonsense or giving way to xenophobes, he decides to curb the creation of low-skilled jobs.