The vulture State
1. With the early elections, the new financing for Catalonia has been frozen despite the fireworks of government propaganda. Those 4.686 billion euros in additional funds that Spain was to contribute to Catalonia, each year, starting from 2027, we can already kiss goodbye. And even more so if, after November 29th, there is a different kind of majority in Congress. We never trusted that this financing agreement, made against all the PP-led autonomous communities and almost all of those led by the PSOE, would ever be fulfilled. It was a promise of money that gave Salvador Illa some headlines, but it did not resolve Catalonia's needs and only recovered a quarter of the fiscal deficit that we drag year after year. The arrears were not even being discussed anymore. But those millions that will now no longer arrive would have been welcome.
2. The list of grievances regarding money that was supposed to be invested in Catalonia and that we see nowhere also causes dread. Data from the General Intervention Board of the State Administration, with 2025 figures, indicate that Catalonia received 8.6% of the total state investments, despite representing approximately 19% of the Spanish GDP. Madrid, to pick a community at random, concentrated 21% of total investments. In absolute figures, the state investment executed in Catalonia was 1.321 billion, while in Madrid it reached 3.218 billion. More than double what we got here. The numbers speak for themselves.
3. Another matter is the degree of execution of public investment. Year after year we ask ourselves what is the point of announcing investments if, afterwards, a very important part does not materialize. Let's put figures to it. According to the Department of Economy, in the 2021-2024 period, of all the massive amount that the State said it would execute in Catalonia, only 40% has been fulfilled. The Generalitat, on the other hand, has carried out 83% of the planned investments. As for the municipalities as a whole, they have reached an execution rate of 87% of everything they had budgeted to do in each municipality. The principle derived from this is that the closer decisions are made, the more and better things are resolved. Conversely, the summary is that Spain does not care about Catalonia.
4. Rodalies is the most paradigmatic case. Decades of neglect and centralist management have left Catalans abandoned by the State. When it is not the trains, it is the tracks, or the overhead lines, or the train drivers, or the stations where even the escalators do not work. We do not care if it is a matter of Renfe or Adif. They should give us a decent service to travel from one place to another, every day of the year, with a slight acceptable delay and without going like sardines in a tin. Each year is worse than the previous one, no matter how much they show us record investment figures that the user never notices anywhere. Nor will they notice. Rodalies has collapsed and, to fix it, it would take more than a decade of work if everything were done right starting today. Nothing suggests that it will be so. The chaos despairs us, but the people are so battered that the revolt of the indignant is not sensed anywhere.
5. This article has turned out to be packed with numbers. Perhaps too many. Personally, I prefer letters. Following the housing crisis, and the new decrees that Pedro Sánchez tries to save in extremis, there has been much talk about the vulture funds that strangle tenants. Authentic scavengers that look only after their own good. On the other hand, the vulture State that drowns us and condemns us to second-rate colonial structures is never talked about. Not a little, not at all. Perhaps because there are parties, which still call themselves independentist, that play the game of this State that lives better with a submissive, strangled, and meek Catalonia. That is to say, a Catalonia insensitive to mistreatment.
