José
Antonio Zarzalejos
Saturday, 04/25/2020 – 09:39
The Spokeswoman of Presidency, Meritxell Budó, in her office / GENERALITAT
According to a member of the Government, the opposition behavior of the Generalitat is being “brutal” during this pandemic. This ministerial manager considers that Laura Borràs had the opportunity to “sweeten, distance or qualify” the statements of Meritxell Budó according to which in an independent Catalonia there would be “less deaths and less contagion”. The same Prime Minister asked the JxCat spokesperson in the plenary session of Wednesday to rectify the spokesperson for the Govern, but far from attending to the suggestion of Pedro Sánchez, he ignored it and added that “the virus does have borders”, claiming the good control of the covid-19 in “Portugal and Andorra” and claiming the management of the “small states”. And self-determination.
But the government disappointment with the appeal to the coffins as an argument to demand independence increased with the speech of Gabriel Rufián, who said he was “closer to ‘no’ to the extension of the state of alarm than to abstention”, but, on all because he did not distance himself from the necrophiliac thesis of the Government spokeswoman and Laura Borràs. The Republican spokesman urged the Executive to reestablish the meetings of the dialogue table agreed between his party and the PSOE, but he was warned that “even remotely” the conditions for this do not exist.
Late dissociation
Hence, 24 hours after the plenary session of the Congress, Rufián came to the fore to consider the words of Meritxell Budó and Joan Canadell in support of the ‘counselor’ to be “disastrous”. According to the president of the Chamber of Commerce of Barcelona, ”Spain is unemployment and death, and Catalonia, life and future”. The pro-independence MP declared last Thursday not to share these excessive appreciations, assuring that “they will never hear me say something like that”. However, in the government, the swerve of the ERC spokesperson “is late” and his request on the intergovernmental dialogue table seems to fall on deaf ears for an indefinite time and, perhaps, definitely.
In socialist media it is verified – “it is an objective fact” they say – that JxCat, by voting against the extension of the state of alarm and announcing that it will address the de-escalation determined by the Generalidad, maintains the same parliamentary behavior as Vox, and that it also , like Budó and Borràs, “uses the dead”, each in its own way, “to erode” the management of a unique authority that, if already questioned in practically all the autonomous communities, in Catalonia is being “directly vilified” . On the other hand, and always according to these sources, Joaquim Torra “should be responsible for the concentration in Perpignan on February 29” previous, they recall, to the manifestations of 8-M, when the virus spread throughout Spain.
Surveys and strategies
From the PSOE surveys “not very favorable” for the Govern and its management are used. The last one, made by Metroscopia on Wednesday, which shows that, although half of the respondents (48%) negatively value the coordination between the Government and the autonomous regions and the efforts of the executives of the communities are better rated than those of the central Executive, in Catalonia the latter is approved by 49% of the respondents, compared to 40% who think otherwise. These polls make the Government and the PSOE think that there is little harmony between Catalan citizens and the “tremendous alarmism” of Torra, Budó or Canadell.
In the PP there is also discrepancy with the line of argument in the criticism of the management of the pandemic by the Government. “It is one thing to emphasize that, in Spain, the numbers of deceased and infected are devastating, and another to attribute to Health authorities the malicious alteration of the data”. The conservative sectors are betting “by not appearing to be like the pro-independence authorities” and “to have a greater influence on the temporal and material aspects of the management of the pandemic: moment of the government reaction, available sanitary material, coordination with the autonomous communities, crisis of personal liberties, disproportionate confinement and internal discrepancies in the coalition”.
The balance of the PNV
Basque nationalists seem to be finding the best balance point, because at the same time that they claim asymmetry in de-escalation and the integrity of the autonomous powers, they have refrained from handling “hurtful” speeches with the Government, despite the fact that the executive of the PNV has given a double and discreet ultimatum to the Moncloa: the Basque industry must begin to operate “at full capacity” and, therefore, second warning, its deputies will not support more extensions of the state of alarm, among other reasons because the elections to the Parliament of Vitoria-Gasteiz will be held next July.
At the party’s headquarters in Bilbao, however, they are taking care of the speech: “Although in the Basque Country we have suffered a lot with the pandemic, and we are continuing with it, we would not dream of claiming sovereignty using the dead in it, nor do it in a few moments when solidarity is required, not only from the State as a whole, but the essential solidarity of the European Union “.
Change on the Catalan political dashboard
The most general conclusion in the Madrid political circuits is that “those of Torra and Puigdemont have lost the oremus”, that ERC –responsible for the portfolios of health and social affairs in the Govern– has not known how to play the cards that differentiate it from JxCat, and that Rufián has reacted late to what he considers “disastrous” statements by Budó and Canadell.
And it is that the Catalan policy, observed from Madrid, has changed substantially: the Parliament of Catalonia has approved the first budget since 2017, the Supreme Court relies for a long time on the cassation sentence on the disqualification of the President of the Generalidad and moves away the prospect of elections to be held after the public accounts were approved. In Madrid and Barcelona, nothing of what was said has come out.
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