Aragonès sets aside confidence vote agreed with CUP
He believes it makes no sense after CUP opposed the budget, although he wants to win them back
BarcelonaFor days now several signs pointed in this direction, but confirmation did not come until the last day of the year. Generalitat president Pere Aragonès explained this Friday that he has decided to set aside the confidence vote he had agreed with CUP would be held halfway through his mandate, at the beginning of 2023. As he has explained in an interview with Efe, the president considers that CUP's rejection opposition to the budget means that "it does not make much sense" to maintain that commitment. Even so, he has assured that "in the next weeks" he hopes to win back CUP's "trust", so that they can be the government's stable partner once again.
The confidence vote was agreed in the investiture deal between ERC-CUP as a way to convince CUP with the following reasoning: they supported the executive for two years and, if they believed that ERC had not complied, halfway through the mandate a confidence vote would be called so that they could provoke early elections if they so wished. In the nine months that have passed since then, however, the two parties have been drifting apart until the definitive rupture over the budget. "It does not make much sense to maintain a question of confidence if this confidence has already been withdrawn before," the president concluded. This Wednesday assistant general secretary of ERC, Marta Vilalta, spoke along the same lines in an interview with ARA.
Fulfilling commitments
Despite binning the confidence vote, Aragonès has assured that his will is that the rest of the "programmatic commitments" that he acquired with the CUP in the investiture agreement "are applied". And not only this, but also look for the way to rebuild bridges with the anticapitalists. "We must work from now on to rebuild this trust and this is what I will do in the coming weeks and months," he reiterated. How will he do it? He believes that if the Government manages to execute the approved budgets –which required En Comú's support– several of the agreements reached with the CUP during the investiture will be implemented, such as housing policies, a pilot plan for universal basic income or the launch of a public energy company. And this will, in his opinion, make everyone regain confidence.