We are 8 million, and if we are 10, even better.

There are 8,113,490 of us Catalans in Catalonia. I don't know if we'll ever reach 10 million, but it seems absolutely reasonable to me that as a country, and especially the public authorities, we plan and anticipate what public services and infrastructure we will need when the time comes.

The debate in Catalonia should be about how many millions we need to guarantee first-class public services and infrastructure for the millions of Catalans living in our country, not how many millions of Catalans we are or how many of us are all Catalans.

These resources must obviously come from a new, fair and unique financing agreement that, once and for all, recognizes that it is Catalonia that sustains the healthcare, education, long-term care, and public safety of its citizens. These are universal rights, and therefore, for all Catalans. Resources that must also come from fair taxation, in which those who have more pay more. We have dedicated our hearts and souls to the Commons in this task in the budget agreements since 2020.

Undoubtedly, the growth in the Generalitat's budget in recent years is explained by the economic cycle, but it is also a result of our role. We have built a model that radically departs from Ayuso's Madrid. The latest example is the tax against real estate speculation, based on a substantial increase in the property transfer tax, which is paid only by large property holders.

To frame the debate on how many Catalans we are or can be is clearly to buy into the framework of the far right, whether pro-independence or pro-Spanish. And it's shocking that this debate is being approached from that perspective by sectors of the Catalan left. Just look at the far right's sympathies with these theoretically disguised arguments about sustainability or our productive model.

There are three compelling reasons to reject this framework outright:

First of all, it's a debate solely serving the interests of racism and xenophobia, because there would be no question of reaching 10 million Catalans if they were the children of parents with eight Catalan surnames. Or would anyone even be considering embracing China's one-child policy?

Secondly, the arrival of people—I insist, people—in Catalonia has little to do with our productive model. We don't summon them, they flee. As the late Arcadi Oliveres always explained, they leave driven by a lack of life expectancy. And in this case, it's not a metaphorical hope but a literal one. What would we do if we were in the Congo, Sudan, or Gaza today?

And thirdly, it makes no sense to frame this debate in ecological terms because we're talking about people who already live, or rather, barely survive, on our planet, some of them on the southern shore of the Mediterranean, much closer to countries that are part of the Schengen Area and, therefore, have agreements on the free movement of people. We could list a long list of cities with more populations than a country like Catalonia, with 10 million people.

Finally, one of the arguments that warns against the Catalonia of 10 million is the risk it poses to our language, Catalan. I can't understand at what point hope gave way to defeatism. This year, in the centenary of the Year of Candlemas, history teaches us that at a time when Catalan, far from being protected, was persecuted by the dictatorship, it was embraced by thousands upon thousands of welcome people who saw another way of being one people. Some, like my father, who learned Catalan out of love, to love my mother even more. Today we also have a self-government that recognizes Catalan as our own language and resources to protect it and strengthen its knowledge, but above all, its use. In a global world and in a Europe that still denies its official status, sooner rather than later, a language spoken only in the Principality by 9 or 10 million people will gain increasingly unstoppable strength and recognition.

Sometimes fiction captures, explains, and warns us better about the dystopian reality of today's world. And as we saw in the great series Borin Noir, "When where melange le brun te le rouge, c'est toujours le brun quien lo lleva".