The agreement between ERC and the PSC for the 2023 budgets will have consequences for the present and the future of Catalonia. The budgets will be approved with the votes of ERC, the Government party, and those of the PSC, the main opposition force, with 33 deputies each, and will far exceed the essential absolute majority of 68 seats thanks to the prior agreement of Aragonès and Jéssica Albiach, the leader of En Comú Podem (ECP).
The pact is very relevant for three main reasons. The first is that it will allow you to have budgets, something always key because the Generalitat is a first-rate economic and social agent and have your accounts operational contributes to economic stability and social well-being. Even more so in 2023, with expansionary budgets -more public spending and little increase in tax pressure-, which will make it possible to better face a year overshadowed by the great uncertainty generated by the war in Ukraine and the spike in inflation. Especially when all international organizations -the IMF most recently- foresee a sharp slowdown in European growth which in Catalonia and Spain exceeded 5% in 2021 and 2022. The budget agreement thus implies a majority commitment to prioritizing stability and social protection . Without budgets, the uncertainty would be greater and much more worrisome. Plus paves the way towards better infrastructures, such as the airport, necessary in order not to lose connection capacity and competitiveness.
Secondly, because it is, for more than 10 years, the first major political pact between two forces of great implantation (CKD and PSC) who have been facing each other and in different trenches during the ‘procés’. The two have different objectives, even divergent, regarding the future of Catalonia -one is pro-independence and the other federalist-, but they have been capable of subordinating their discrepancies to the short-term needs of the country to withstand a difficult economic moment. And so that feelings of identity, always respectable, do not hinder day-to-day life or the future, which unfortunately has happened many times in recent years.
It is not normal for a government’s accounts to be approved with the votes of the first opposition party. It is a triumph of pragmatism
Aragonès and Illa therefore deserve applause because they have managed -despite the difficulties and harshness of the long negotiation- to overcome a situation of ‘impasse’ and reach transversal pacts that will be necessary in the coming years. Catalan politics may be entering the ‘post-process’ because, at the moment of truth, ERC has reached the conclusion that the pact with the PSC and ECP will allow it to govern better than the coalition with Junts per Catalunya. Just the opposite of what the independence movement preached in the last Catalan campaign -with a veto to the PSC included- and to the investiture pact of Aragonès with Junts and the CUP. The identity axis loses prominence and a transversal pact is achieved that may be pioneering. We are still a long way from the always tense and fruitful collaboration between the PNV and the PSOE in Euskadi, but much less far than a few months ago.
Finally, the pact is relevant because it implies the triumph -at least for once- of pragmatism. It is not normal for the budgets of a government that has been left without a majority to be approved with the votes of the main opposition party. Nor is it normal for a government with 33 deputies out of 135 to continue to govern with the relative comfort of approved budgets.
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That is why it is a meritorious agreement that has been reached with difficulties and roughness due to deep mistrust and recent antagonisms. Illa renounces, out of responsibility, making life almost impossible for her main electoral competitor. And Aragonés bets, out of responsibility, that a government party must assume the realities, including parliamentary ones, if it wants to maintain the trust of the voters. The main thing is that the two parties have been able to prioritize the ‘seny’ to the legitimate sentiments and party interests. He is encouraging. And even more if we compare it with what happens in Madrid between the PSOE and the PP.
But the day to day continues. And the relationship between the ERC and the PSC will be complicated in a year with two major electoral campaigns ahead.