In an interview published in this newspaper last Sunday, Jaume Giró, former Catalan Minister of Economy, said things must be called by their name, childish fears must be left behind, and an economic agreement for Catalonia must be reached with Pedro Sánchez's government, without ambiguity. Giró, well acquainted with the ins and outs of Spanish power, due to his previous business stints in Ibex-35 companies over several decades, argues that it is time to put pressure on Madrid, and that the economic agreement is the only way to definitively solve the resource drainage suffered by Catalonia, which it can no longer bear if its sudden and unjust impoverishment, which allows for other territories to get richer, is to be alleviated.
Giró said this in Sunday's interview, in which he also called out the use of misleading concepts on the financing issue, in an attempt to confuse people. Without going any further, to speak of "unique financing", which is still spoken of specially by Catalan minister Natàlia Mas and now much less so by the Catalan president Pere Aragonès and Marta Rovira, secretary general of Esquerra Republicana (ERC). "Singular financing cannot be a singular leg-pull. And that's how it looks so far", reiterated Giró.
On Monday, when I heard Esther Peña, the PSOE's spokesperson, shamelessly state that what the socialists are looking for is a new financing model in which all the autonomous communities find their uniqueness recognised, I remembered Giró's warnings: A unique financing, tailor-made and for all within the common system. It is not as if they are fools and have not understood anything. The Spanish socialists know their limits, and they do not include Catalonia holding the key to its coffers, as the Basque Country and Navarre do. This is the only way to reverse the chronic deficit and give the Catalans hope of a welfare society. Only in this way can Catalonia's fiscal deficit be eliminated.
With or without the investiture of a new Catalan president —by the way, on Wednesday the clock will start counting down the time for new elections, and no candidate has yet submitted his candidature to a vote— Catalonia's financing is going to be the real battle in the coming months and years. This will not be just any old dispute, as the resistance to the economic agreement will be enormous. But it is a battle that can be won, as no law needs to be changed, and it depends only on the political will of the Spanish government. But it is important, transcendental, not to make cheap pacts, to not settle for promissory contracts on account which, as has been the case before, will be worth nothing.
Abraham Lincoln said “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”. And that is what Spain has been doing with Catalonia's financing.