Esther Palomera, 3 August 2024
Image: Marta Rovira and Pere Aragonés, at the press conference in which they announced the pact with the PSC for the investiture of Illa. Efe/Marta Pérez
The pact with ERC for a Catalan quota opens the door to a second decentralisation of the state
Socialists and Republicans negotiated on the basis that the model will be extendable to the regions that request it, that the shielding of solidarity is unrenounceable and that there is a lack of majority to approve it in the Cortes Generales.
Silence, in politics, is usually a bad companion. Those who do not speak do so because they are giving in, because words can make silence worse, or because they are waiting for the right moment. In this case, the rest mode tends to be tactical. And everything indicates that the lack of explanations and details from Pedro Sánchez, the Government and the PSOE regarding the pact signed with ERC for a Catalan quota, similar to that of Navarre and the Basque Country, hides exactly that. And that, even if aphasia works against their interests or produces an intense movement of internal contestation, “everything will be better understood when the time comes”.
This is how the socialists justify the fact that this week they have allowed the republicans to set up their own narrative and that this has been installed in the public conversation in such a way that the right has been able to once again stir up the scarecrow of Spain is breaking up. There were two milestones on the political horizon that advised caution. The first, the consultation of ERC militants, has already passed the test. By the skin of its teeth and surely with consequences for the Republicans in the pro-independence electoral space. The second is the investiture of Salvador Illa, and until this takes place no piece of the jigsaw will be completely in place.
The agreement is complex and the risk of it falling apart at the drop of a hat is high. Hence, every word is measured, as is the role to be played by the signatories. The PSOE has renounced, for the moment, to give ERC the protagonism that Junqueras has denied it over the last year and has asked for time and prudence. In exchange, it has told them that under no circumstances will the solidarity of the regional financing system be put at risk.
What those who have spent years thinking about the current model do admit is that, after more than a decade in force, “it cannot be revised” and that a new “fiscal approach” is needed for the territory as a whole to put an end to the problems of underfunding that several regions complain about.
“What is underway is a second decentralisation of the state”, they recognise, and a “highly complex agreement” that today does not even have the approval of the coalition government partners. And this is a reality that the socialists have not hidden from the ERC negotiators at any time. What they did not expect – at least with the forcefulness that has been produced – are the voices from within the PSOE itself that have expressed their opposition to the agreement in the terms that have become known.
The criticism goes beyond Emiliano García Page or Javier Lambán and even the Asturian Adrián Barbón has been categorical: “We are against the exit of any community from the common regime and we will not support anything that goes against the interests of Asturias”. The President of the Principality is not exactly one of the PSOE barons who can be accused of a lack of loyalty to the Government, nor is he one of those who is against a federalisation of the State, but he is not in favour of accepting that the new model pivots on the basis of the principle of ordinality, and he has conveyed this to Salvador Illa, who these days is working hard to convince the PSOE’s territorial leaders that “nothing is at risk”.
Moncloa and the socialist leadership cling to the great political value of the fact that a pro-independence group like ERC will vote for the investiture of a socialist like Illa, a rupture of blocks that “definitively puts an end to the procés”.
According to what elDiario.es has been able to gather from some members of the federal leadership and territorial leaders, they have also been told that the agreement with ERC “will be extendable” to all the communities that require it and that it does not appear in the document, as happened with the removal of the Autonomous Liquidity Fund, because the Republicans demanded that it should be so in order not to arouse reticence among their bases at the time of the consultation.
The agreement, therefore, would be a kind of “coffee for all” like the one that José María Aznar agreed with Jordi Pujol to cede 30 per cent of personal income tax, or the one that José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero agreed with Artur Más to transfer 50 per cent of the same tax and also that of VAT. The consequence would be a different taxation model to the current one, whose shortcomings are more than proven. The problem is that only the autonomous regions that contribute to the solidarity fund would claim the quota and that, afterwards, the percentage of solidarity with the regions with fewer resources would have to be established with each of them. But this is a question on which, for the moment, it is preferred not to give too many details, beyond the fact that in the case of Catalonia this percentage and the development of the model would be negotiated with Illa, “a socialist committed not only to equality and the redistribution of wealth, but not at all suspicious of wanting to do away with Spain or with solidarity between territories”, according to the Monclovite plumbing.
In any case, the solidarity quota “is a tax and this is not being outside the system”, as has already been installed in public conversation. The debate, for the socialists, is terminological, and they do not seem willing to fight it until Illa is sworn in as president. In fact, María Jesús Montero, the Finance Minister and probably the socialist who has most often denied that the PSOE was going to agree to what it has finally agreed, has spent a week without making any public statements. Now she will have to do the same pedagogical work as Félix Bolaños did when he negotiated the amnesty with Carles Puigdemont’s party. The difference between the two is that the Minister of the Presidency, unlike other socialists, will not be able to find a single statement in the newspaper archives against criminal oblivion, while Montero has a notable record against a possible Catalan agreement, both as head of the Treasury and when she was minister for the same subject in the Andalusian government.
ERC is no stranger to the difficulties of the agreed model being approved by the Spanish Parliament, and not only because of the regionalist parties that form part of Sumar, but also because the vote of Junts, which was seeking a repeat election in Catalonia and has put all kinds of sticks in the wheels of the negotiation between the PSC and Marta Rovira’s party in order to derail the agreement, would also be in doubt. To fulfil what has been agreed, therefore, a long process with an uncertain end is now beginning, and “this has not been denied to the Republican negotiators at any time”, the socialists stress.
If the PSOE, although it does not say so, knows that in colloquial terms it has eaten a toad with this pre-agreement, ERC is fully aware that theirs have done the same. That of the socialists is a party that supported the application of 155 of the Constitution when Catalonia unilaterally declared independence. The cost to be paid in any case,” says a prominent socialist, “is compensated by Illa’s presidency”, which shows that Sánchez’s commitment to prioritise his investiture over any other issue was literal. Something that is not fully understood in the rest of the PSOE’s territories, where the brand lost the majority of regional governments after the regional elections of 2023.
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