Several business organizations, headed by the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce and its president Joan Canadell, have held a meeting this week to try to reverse the chronic infrastructure deficit in Catalonia. At this point, this is a perfectly defined problem which, together with the fiscal deficit, also chronic, suffocates Catalan economy and hinders its competitiveness. Not all Catalan economic operators attended the meeting. This has to do more with particular shares of prominence than with substantive discrepancy regarding this issue - the Barcelona Chamber estimated at 45 billion euros the investment necessary until 2030 to overcome the deficit, whereas Foment del Treball Nacional, the main Catalan employer organisation, considers that the infrastructure deficit of the last ten years is 28 billion euros.
We are talking, in any case, about astronomical figures that justify the anger across Catalan society. On Saturday, Catalan president Quim Torra, coinciding with the opening of the Zona Franca metro station on Barcelona's Line 10 South, has called for all Catalan public agents and departments to stand together in demanding that the Spanish state carry out the necessary investments to let Catalonia have a proper railway service once and for all.
Catalan representatives have set forth this request to the Spanish government again and again, getting no real results. Whereas news records are filled with promises and headlines, results are, unfortunately, very scarce. The Spanish state has always found an excuse to avoid this and you just have to review what has happened in this century: absolute majority and recentralisation onset during José María Aznar's government; incomplete statute of Catalonia and subsequent economic crisis during José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's government; austerity policies and investment restraints during Mariano Rajoy's government, before the total crisis brought about by the Catalan pro-independence process and the financial suffocation to the Catalan government; and finally, eighteen months of Pedro Sánchez's government with no public accounts approved, extending the 2018 Popular Party's state budget until today.
As if that were not enough, the budget lines for Catalonia's infrastructures have never been used up, unlike Madrid's, as shown by the actual 2015-2018 budget execution, which, according to Spain's comptroller general was 65,9% in Catalonia as opposed to 113,9% in Madrid. The rules applied must be very different for such data contrast. And although Catalan pro-independence parties must stick to their goals and facilitate an agreed referendum, permanently accusing the Spanish state of mistreating the citizens of Catalonia must also be part of their daily agenda of public denouncement.