After weeks idling and with the focus more placed on the negotiations in Madrid than in Parliament, the Government step on the accelerator and faces decisive days for the budgets of the Generalitat. The negotiation was already on track with the ‘communs’, with whom they maintain an intense schedule of meetings, and this Tuesday they ran aground with the PSC. It has been decisive that, this time, the ‘councillor’ of Economy, Natalia Masand that of the Presidency, Laura Vilagrawill sit down at the table so that, now yes, the Socialists consider that the conditions exist to analyze all the information available to them and begin to Make proposals. “The meeting went well“, they acknowledge.
This does not mean, advise the party of Salvador Illa, that the context is so propitious as to close “in four days” what has not been discussed for months. If the objective of the Government is to give the go-ahead to the accounts next week, both the Socialists and the ‘communs’ notify the ‘president’ Pere Aragones that the conditions do not exist to reach an agreement imminently and that you can start thinking about another calendar. Unless, they warn, you want to meet a full amendment. In reality, the main thing for the Executive is that the entire debate in Parliament be before the end of the year, a horizon before which its negotiators also frown but do not consider it impossible.
“We will not go in a hurry now”underline both the socialists and the ‘communs’, who try to make the Government weigh in on their minority by giving it to understand that they cannot handle the calendar at will, especially after weeks of pointing out the “slowness” and, on the part of the PSC, to regret that their command was not attended to. “It is practically unfeasible for there to be an agreement this week,” warned the leader of En Comú Podem in Parliament, Jessica Albiach. “Nothing is impossible, but an agreement this week is quite difficult,” concluded the socialist spokesperson, Alicia Romero. Given this response, Aragonès has already said that he is confident that the groups “will not delay” the negotiation unnecessarily.
However the thaw is evident and they recognize each other. The idea is that on Thursday or Friday the PSC will meet again with the Government to present their claims. This Wednesday there will be a new meeting with the ‘comuns’, in which Albiach expects a return to the proposals made by his group in terms of renewable energy, mobility and housing. However, he has dropped, pending the health folder -hot with the called doctors’ strike- and the social one.
In fact, the 8% increase in the Income Sufficiency Indicator of Catalonia (IRSC) that the Government has agreed with unions and employers and that will allow an increase in social subsidies, as EL PERIÓDICO DE CATALUNYA has advanced, is one of the demands made by all the groups that are part of the Government’s negotiating arithmetic. Aragonès seeks with this agreement with the social agents to have more muscle to overcome misgivings from the opposition and that the pact arrives sooner.
With the negotiations underway with the PSC and the ‘communs’, Aragonès now has to verify whether or not there is water with Junts, who will just deliver their proposals this Wednesday and who have already threatened to delete themselves from the dialogue if the Government closes before an agreement with the socialists. Illa, on the other hand, is not bothered that in an eventual agreement they could even all be there, although he continues to demand that the ‘president’ acknowledge clearly and publicly that he wants to agree with the PSC.
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However, parliamentary procedures have to be taken into account as well. Once the Consell Executiu approves the accounts, the table and the board of spokespersons will have to meet to admit them and start the process. You should then open a period of ten calendar days so that the groups that wish to present amendments to the entirety and in those first seven days the ‘consellers’ must appear in commission to explain the numbers of their departments.
It is after this minimum period of ten days that the entire debate can be scheduled, with the difficulty that the calendar for the next few weeks is diabolical: the next one is the Constitution Bridge and the next two are plenary sessions. Even so, squeezing schedules and lengthening days, you could still fit in a extraordinary plenary session in the last days of the year to eat the grapes with the budgets on track and pending final approval that would arrive in mid-February.