The elections in Andalusia have been held and finally in Catalonia we now have permission to approve the budgets of the Generalitat without bothering the PSOE and its candidate, María Jesús Montero. This waiting period has not prevented, of course, the PP candidate for the Andalusian presidency from attacking the socialist candidate over the new regional financing system, with phrases such as: "[This agreement will cause] the interests of Andalusians to be trampled on again, equality between Spaniards to be broken and, in short, one of the most beautiful coexistence projects, which is Spain, to be cracked".

Esquerra had agreed on three issues to reach an agreement on Salvador Illa's budgets. On the one hand, the orbital railway line which, as the ARA explained last Monday, socialists and republicans have reached an agreement to materialize it in the next fifteen years. On the other hand, the commercial company that is to oversee state investments has also been agreed upon. And there was a third issue, a transfer that ERC had not yet revealed and is in the process of finalizing with the socialists. Well, it concerns the Consorci de la Zona Franca: PSC and Esquerra are finalizing an agreement so that Catalonia gains a majority in the entity, which until now was entirely state-owned.

In terms of budgets, it could be said that Catalonia is not (really) Spain. The balance of parliamentary forces will allow for them before summer. Specifically, so that they can be approved by Parliament in July. It only remains for ERC, which has convened a national council for Monday, to give it the go-ahead. The situation is perceived in the happy faces of some government members, especially the Minister of Economy, Alícia Romero.

For a few weeks now, the Government and Esquerra have been negotiating the budgets that derailed in March with discretion. The two parties decided to give themselves a second chance to try to reach an agreement before the summer holidays and, after multiple meetings and working groups, as the ARA has learned, socialists and republicans in Barcelona and Madridhave unblocked two issues that pave the way for the accounts. If part of the Quart Cinturó (by road) was what unblocked the 2022 budgets of Pere Aragonès' Government, the orbital railway axis, a kind of railway Quart Cinturó, is what seems to be getting Salvador Illa's first accounts on track. It is about the railway network to connect the second metropolitan ring without passing through Barcelona.

Ripoll's politics has acquired national relevance, with media overexposure of its councilors due to the arrival of Aliança Catalana. This week, the municipal spokesperson for the PSC, Enric Pérez (Ripoll, 1980), has experienced this. After his group abstained and allowed Silvia Orriols' budget approval, the indignant socialist leadership summoned the two councilors, and they put their positions at the party's disposal.

Will we have Generalitat budgets at the beginning of summer? What, how, and at what speed are the PSC and ERC negotiating to approve them? We should have them. In fact, it is very relevant to have them. Normalizing institutional policy without approved accounts is an anomaly in every rule: resources are lost, processes are slowed down, initiatives and projects are stalled, sectors of civil society –economic, social, and cultural– that depend on public commitment, which are the vast majority, are harmed. Too many things suffer. The worst thing is to settle into a dynamic of budgetary frustration.

After the clash over budgets that were not even negotiated, the PSC and ERC reset the clock. It was in mid-March when the two parties decided to give themselves a new opportunity and resume talks once Salvador Illa withdrew the bill and Esquerra stopped making IRPF collection a red line. Since before Easter, therefore, socialists and republicans have been negotiating away from the spotlight that captured them before the debate on the entirety of the accounts. Talks are weekly and are conducted with secrecy. The deadline is July, but the Government is in a hurry and the Minister of Economy, Alícia Romero, has stated that the executive's wish is to have them validated by Sant Joan. Is this feasible?

Earthquake in the PSC. The socialist municipal group of Ripoll acknowledges "the error that the abstention in the City Council's budget plenary session represents" which allowed Aliança Catalana to approve them, and the two councilors of the group have placed their positions at the party's disposal. They did so after meeting with the PSC federation of the Girona regions, which had previously issued a statement distancing itself from the decision made by the municipal group. "This decision does not have the endorsement or prior knowledge of this federation," stated the federation, which had summoned the two councilors "immediately" to "demand explanations and act accordingly.

The rector of the University of Barcelona, Joan Guàrdia, becomes emotional when explaining the honoris causa he has just awarded to the medical director of BioNTech: “They are one step away from finding a vaccine for cancer. Do you know what that means?” He tells us this to a group of members of the UB Social Council, gathered on a cold March morning. The German Özlem Türeci has indeed predicted that in ten years, treating cancer with mRNA vaccines will be commonplace. This is one of the “wonderful things,” as the rector says, that happen in our universities daily and which do not always receive the attention they deserve.

If you've been following the story of how the Government withdrew the budget proposal it had submitted to Parliament at the last minute, it won't surprise you that today we begin by emphasizing that The elections in Andalusia now have a date: May 17th.

After doing a reset With ERC, the government hopes that negotiations with the Republicans will bear fruit and that the budget will be approved before Sant Joan (St. John's Day), but ERC is reluctant to commit to anything more than continuing to discuss it. While the Minister of Economy, Alícia Romero, wants to bring the budget back to Parliament between the end of April and the beginning of May and have it approved before June 24, the ERC spokesperson, Isaac Albert, refuses to set a timetable and asks the Socialists to make proposals that allow Catalonia to "gain sovereignty" in order to secure a budget. In any case, the PSC and ERC will resume negotiations this week.

A key thinker of the 20th century died a few days ago. Jürgen Habermas, a German, was born in 1929, during the Great Depression. He lived through the defeat of 1945, the Constitution drafted by the Allies for the new Federal Republic in 1949, the crisis of East Germany in 1989 and reunification, and lamented the missed opportunity of not creating a new constitution for Germany in 1990. Habermas defended a political reality based on three principles: promoting participation and transparency of information. He believed that individuals should be able to distance themselves from events and exercise their own judgment, to think for themselves, but his opinion has been largely forgotten. He observed with concern the drift toward technocracy and the erosion of solidarity. He was a political conciliator and a representative of the Frankfurt School and of the more European, restrained, and analytical German thought. An anchor for stability. His passing is a loss for Europe. He said on numerous occasions that the homeland of Europeans should be Europe, not small national homelands. Habermas thought big.

The seal on the agreement was put by Salvador Illa and Oriol Junqueras in a meeting of just over two hours at the Palau de la Generalitat on Tuesday afternoon. But the pact had been being forged since the previous weekend after days of deadlock. At the Palau and at the PSC headquarters, the strategy of buying time to avoid a parliamentary defeat that would have left the executive shaken eventually prevailed. The party's number 2, Lluïsa Moret, had a lot to do with it, explain various sources to ARA. But to limit the damage, the socialists demanded, in return, a commitment from the republicans to stop positioning the IRPF as a red line. All this, to reset the clock. To get here, however, the conversations went through ups and downs, from tense meetings to lunches and homemade doughnuts to save the negotiation.

Oriol López (Mollet del Vallès, 1978) is the deputy general secretary of ERC and one of the party's negotiators in the talks with the Government that, for the moment, have led to the withdrawal of a budget that was already being processed, for the first time.

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The president of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, presented a budget proposal to force negotiations with ERC, but the gamble backfired. The first lesson of this political crisis, which has led him to withdraw the budget proposal, is that the government cannot act as if it has a majority it does not. The investiture agreement brought Illa to the presidency of the Generalitat, but he needs to negotiate and uphold agreements to continue making progress in the legislature.

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Albert Dalmau (Barcelona, 1990) visits l'ARA after a week in which, despite everything, the Government has saved a match ball and has gained time to approve the budgets.The government yesterday made a gesture quite unprecedented in Catalan political history, which is the withdrawal of the budgets. Is it a tactical withdrawal?

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Amid the debate over the budget proposal that the PSC ultimately withdrew, it's worth highlighting five key economic issues where Catalonia has a lot at stake in the coming years. Beyond the current situation, the essential thing is to ensure a solid foundation for facing the numerous challenges ahead.

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The answers to this question can be diverse, and yet I venture one: without budgets, one can administer, but not govern. The distinction between these two concepts is not insignificant. Administering would be equivalent to guaranteeing the ordinary functioning of public services and the continuity of public policies already initiated. In contrast, governing involves setting priorities, transforming the present, and preparing for the future. To administer, a government is not necessary; public employees are sufficient. To govern in the sense I have mentioned, a government is indeed necessary.

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This is evidence that Catalonia needs a new budget after two extensions. It is also evidence that the negotiating strategies of the PSC and ERC to reach an agreement had reached a dead end. With the Catalan government's decision to withdraw the budget proposal (a gesture unprecedented in Catalan politics) and ERC's announcement that it is willing to negotiate without red lines, the situation has been unblocked, and a possible agreement before the summer is now in sight.

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John von Neumann was not particularly fond of lanterns –Deception—in poker games—but the father of Game Theory recognized its usefulness in keeping any zero-sum negotiation on edge. Of course, he also warned that one had to know how to play them. To begin with, the success of any lantern It depends on whether the other party—Von Neumann's study focused primarily on two-way negotiations—can consider it plausible. And this is precisely where the negotiating strategy between ERC and PSC regarding the 2026 budget has failed. Salvador Illa set a deadline, March 20, for the Republicans to stop dragging their feet and engaging in a game of chicken—another concept from Game Theory, which explains that both sides move toward the precipice without wanting to be the first to concede—that has ended in a stalemate. The PSC and ERC have given each other more time because it was the only way to ensure that no one loses.

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