The Government's acid test before the summer
The new financing, the commuter rail operator, and the experts' report on the airport expansion must be submitted this June.
BarcelonaSalvador Illa has tied this week Esquerra's support for the latest credit supplement –with the Comuns still finalizing the negotiations– and at least a year of stability is guaranteed given the lack of budgets and until the time comes to address the 2026 accounts. The president's closing this before the summer is due to two underlying reasons: that the Generalitat can use these additional resources before the end of the year and that the parallel negotiations with his investiture partners are jeopardized. There are three key issues that must be finalized this coming month: the new Catalan financing model agreed almost a year ago with the Republicans, progress on the transfer of the Cercanías (local trains), or an issue that Republicans and Comuns are particularly wary of: the expansion of El Prat airport.
Precisely on this last issue, the Government commissioned a report from a group of experts months ago to make a proposal for its expansion. The executive branch stated that the text should be ready in January, but the government itself later made sure not to make it public until it had approved the three credit supplements. President Salvador Illa himself has said that the report will be released "before the summer." The Catalan government emphasizes that the expansion proposal does not need to go through Parliament, meaning it does not require the votes of its two partners. However, if the proposal includes an extension of the third runway that affects the Ricarda natural area, it will be rejected by Comuns and ERC, and it remains to be seen whether they will enforce this opposition in any way. In the investiture agreement between the Socialists and the Republicans, the red line was set: keeping this natural area intact, and the focus was placed on the governance of the infrastructure, which they would like the Catalan government to assume.
Furthermore, both the new financing and the transfer of the commuter train system have a date marked in red on the calendar: June 30th. The Socialists and Republicans already established in the investiture agreement that "[the new financing model] will have to be formalized during the first half of 2025 in the bilateral commission between the Catalan government and the Spanish government." A meeting that for now has no date. Before then, the group of experts formed a few months ago and coordinated by Martí Carnicer should publish its report on financing, as it must form the basis of the new system.
The first challenge facing the Catalan treasury is collecting all the personal income tax for 2025 next year, which is why the Catalan government has already begun expanding the structure of the Catalan Tax Agency—200 new positions should be announced before June 30th. One of the issues that experts and negotiators will have to resolve on both sides is whether Catalonia will ultimately leave the common system. The Republicans had said they would request this through a reform of the Lofca (Spanish Civil Service Act), while the Socialists are refusing to leave the common system.
The constitution of the commuter rail operator
The transfer of Cercanías is a long-standing project—ERC agreed to it with the PSOE following Pedro Sánchez's investiture two years ago—and the first details should already be visible. The process to transfer the first line, the R1, began a few months ago, but one of the key issues remains pending: the company that will manage Cercanías. ERC has committed to the PSC (Spanish Left) to have this new operator ready by June 30th—the statutes were due to be made public in March, but negotiators are still exchanging additional documents—that is, that the company will be established and ready to take over the operation of the Catalan rail network starting that year. The constitution of this company must also include a written statement of the two-year transition period during which the company would become a subsidiary of Renfe. This transitional period, which the Republicans ultimately accepted, has generated discontent among several party leaders, who are skeptical that it will be a step that can be reversed in two years.
