In recent days there has been a lot of talk about whether the right decision has been made by the first secretary of the Catalan Socialists (PSC) and winner of the election on May 12th, Salvador Illa, over claiming the right to opt for the investiture as president of the Generalitat in the parliamentary session of June 26th. Illa has renounced this privilege and, consequently, the speaker of Parliament, Josep Rull, will convene a session without a candidate that will serve, for legal purposes, as an equivalent act to a failed investiture and the clock will start counting down inexorably to a repeat Catalan election in October unless a candidate is invested. The formula of the equivalent act has a precedent, when the then-speaker of the chamber Roger Torrent activated the countdown for an election after president Quim Torra had been banned from office for disobedience because he refused to remove a banner from the facade of the Generalitat palace.
Illa's decision is understandable, but not necessarily the best choice. It's obvious that the numbers don't work for him and he only has 48 parliamentarians (42 from the PSC and 6 from the alternative-left Comuns) out of the 135 in the chamber. It is, therefore, quite certain that his candidacy would fail. But, having said that, he would have claimed his victory as an expression of the will for political change and would have avoided any comparison with the leader of Ciudadanos, Inés Arrimadas, who despite winning the 2017 election, never presented her candidacy to Parliament. The Socialist hopeful says that he wants to explore agreements with the Republican Left (ERC) and the Comuns and, when he has the votes tied up, put himself forward for the investiture. But this strategy has a weak point: what happens if ERC, in the end, chooses not to vote for him and, consequently, Illa can present neither his candidacy nor his policies?
It is true that on June 26th it would not have worked out, but, in the end, it ends up leaving in the hands of ERC not only his presidency - forced by the arithmetic - but also whether he is stained by the need for new elections, because it becomes clear that there is only a president in Catalonia when the parliamentary majority is pro-independence. But there is one more factor to make one think that Illa may have let his chance pass by and it is the way in which the Republicans have escalated the demand for autonomous community funding. If last Saturday it was Marta Rovira who, in a meeting of ERC's national council, suggested that the economic concert, like that of the Basque Country and Navarra, is "the minimum demand" that Pedro Sánchez must grant for the investiture of Illa; this Wednesday the acting president, Pere Aragonès, assured the following in the presentation of the annual report on the Catalan Economy for 2023: "Let no one make a mistake with the financing, we want a concert like the Basque one".
It becomes clear that there is only a president in Catalonia when the parliamentary majority is pro-independence
The point of agreement between ERC and the PSC, which allowed for the ambiguous formula of singular financing for Catalonia, has been blown up and thrown straight into the trash. I don't know how Pedro Sánchez could accept the economic concert for Catalonia, since the rebellion among his own people would burst the seams of the party. It is true that he also opposed the amnesty until he had no more leeway and had no choice but to swallow it, because, if not, he would have lost his position as prime minister. And so he loosened the rope. Having said that, the concert is infinitely more difficult than the amnesty, since here there are direct victims, who are always other autonomous communities who see the harm for them in what is fair for Catalonia. It has already been seen that, even in his parliamentary majority in Madrid, parties like València's Compromís and Aragón's Chunta have come out threatening to withdraw their support.
Whether ERC likes it or not, if it does not obtain the economic concert, rewinding its demands will not be easy. It may even be impossible, since afterwards comes the vote by the party's grassroots. Apparently, the repeat election seems more and more clearly to be the only possible outcome.