The elephant in the Hall of Saint George
Salvador Illa and Oriol Junqueras coincide in the start of the Irla Year with budget negotiations as a backdrop
BarcelonaAll eyes are on the door of the Sant Jordi Hall when, a few minutes after 6 p.m., the President of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, and the leader of ERC, Oriol Junqueras, enter together, accompanied by the President of the Parliament, Josep Rull. They do so practically without looking at each other until they sit in the front row of the hall where the event marking the start of the Year of Irla is being held. There has been no meeting between Junqueras and Illa, and much of the informal conversations before it began had to do with the negotiations between the Socialists and the Republicans. The event is to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Irla's birth, but the budgets are the elephant in the room of the Sant Jordi Hall.
Besides authorities and deputies, the top brass of Esquerra are present at the event. The start of the event catches one of the negotiators frantically typing on his mobile phone, to the point that an ERC leader has to come and get him to tell him to sit down. The anticipation is at its peak when Junqueras, introduced as a "historian," takes the floor to recall a president who lived through moments "full of hope" for Catalans at the beginning of the century, only to later have to face the rise of Francoism and the post-war period from exile. "If we are a nation and have all the hopes of being one in fullness, it is thanks to people like Josep Irla," he emphasizes.
However, while praising his profile as a "politician of race" and a good manager, Junqueras makes a slip of the tongue: he mentions "President Illa" instead of "President Irla," and a murmur runs through the auditorium. The anecdote breaks the ice between the ERC leader and Illa, who greet each other with laughter after the speech. There are no slips when the President of the Parliament, Josep Rull, quotes another Salvador —in this case Espriu— to summarize the president's trajectory in exile with a verse: "If you are called to guide for a brief moment the millennial passage of generations, set aside gold, sleep, and name." These words from La pell de brau well reflect, Rull says, the task that Irla took on from a discreet and consensual role that often led him to not receive recognition commensurate with his figure.
Illa's assignments to Esquerra
When Salvador Illa takes the podium to close the event, no one has yet mentioned the elephant in the room. He does not do so explicitly, but he leaves several assignments for Esquerra that do not go unnoticed in an auditorium full of politicians from the PSC, Esquerra, Junts, and Comuns: "Unity does not mean renouncing one's principles, but rather a sense of responsibility and duty," he says. The veiled messages about the budgets and the IRPF did not end there.
Illa, a declared admirer of former presidents like Tarradellas or Irla, insists that "each era demands its responsibility." Responsibilities that, he emphasizes, must be assumed "by exercising good governance and good opposition" for the country to advance. Illa also appeals to the inclusive Catalanism that Irla sought to defend with a government of concentration and, for a few moments, rescues some ideas from the election campaign that led him to the Palau de la Generalitat to turn the page on the Procés. "When Catalanism has been faithful to inclusive Catalanism, Catalonia has advanced. This is how a country at the service of the people is achieved, not people at the service of the country," he concludes.
Hours earlier, the government spokesperson and Minister of Territory, Sílvia Paneque, spoke without euphemisms: "If I were a journalist, the headline I would write today is that the Government will continue working on the 2026 budgets," she said, in response to journalists' insistence on knowing if the PSC is simply waiting for ERC to change its mind. For those who had to write the chronicles, the headline has been that, barely a week before the key vote in Parliament, the executive and the Republicans remain stuck.
As they left the Sant Jordi Hall, some ERC leaders once again shrugged off the pressure that the Catalan government has begun to increase on Esquerra, given the inability to extract any gesture from the PSOE that both sides of the table increasingly assume will not happen. At least, not in time for the general debate on March 20. In any case, the government has already ruled out that the Treasury will convene a Council of Fiscal and Financial Policy (CPFF) before that date, just after the elections in Castilla y León and before —it is not yet known how many months— the Andalusian elections in which María Jesús Montero will run as the PSOE candidate.
