The Government will not wait to have tied the support to bring to the Parliament the draft budget of the Generalitat for 2022. The calendar of the Executive goes through to approve the accounts next week, at the meeting of the Council of next Tuesday, November 9, whatever the state of negotiations with the CUP, which at the moment not all parties recognize that they are not moving at a good pace. The conseller of Economy Jaume Giró has repeatedly stated that his goal is that next year there are budgets from the first day and, to meet these deadlines, last week sent the accompanying law, which marks the fiscal policy, to the councils that must rule on it.
In this draft, the minister avoided making changes in taxes, although this is one of the explicit requests of the CUP, although sources in the Government speak of the possibility of negotiating it through parliamentary amendments. In this way, both Economy and the Presidency of the Generalitat, which in recent days has been directly involved in the negotiation of the accounts, assume that the agreement with the CUP will not come before the approval of the project, as is customary in the pacts with partners of legislature, but the accounts will begin the parliamentary procedures and will end up closing in the plenary.
This is a scenario that lends itself to the option of ending up approving the budgets with a different formation to that of the anti-capitalists, for example with the socialists, who have offered repeatedly. But from the Govern deny that this is the reason to make the negotiation in parallel to the parliamentary process, which they explain by the difficulty they are having to reach an agreement within the deadlines.
“The budget negotiations continue intensely. We already knew that the negotiations would be complex”, has assured the spokesperson of the Govern, Patricia Plaja, to then ensure that “the Govern wants to close an agreement with the CUP because it believes in the agreement of investiture”. Asked directly about the option of seeking support outside the CUP, Plaja denied it: “What is on the table today is the same as it was weeks before: to reach an agreement with the CUP, nothing more”.
The negotiation with the CUP has been stuck for weeks, with disagreements focused mainly on issues such as the internalization of medical services, the budget allocation for the new public energy company, the consolidation of interim staff, increased spending on education or the candidacy for the Winter Olympics, which the anti-capitalists oppose.
Since the summer the formation has expressed its dissatisfaction with the policies of the Executive, which they believe is trying to please employers, although these have also been critical of some of its initiatives. Specifically, the CUP reproaches Pere Aragonès for not taking a clear position against the expansion of El Prat and demands that the vice-president Jordi Puigneró explain clearly what is the airport model that the Generalitat is betting on.
For its part, the Government denies that there is a plan B to approve the accounts with the anticapitalists, although both Economy and the whole of the Catalan Executive are clear that there must be new accounts next year, among other things to take advantage of the growth of income of the Generalitat thanks to European funds and economic recovery. Hence the hurry in the deadlines. For the accounts to come into force on January 1, the project has to reach the House during the first half of this month. A schedule that clashes with that of the anti-capitalists, who before closing a budget agreement must pass it through their grassroots bodies.
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