Marta Rovira and Pere Aragonès assessed the electoral results of August 2nd. The agreement between the Socialists and ERC talks about establishing a new funding model for Catalonia based on bilateral negotiation with the State. The pact that made Salvador Illa president states that it will be the Generalitat who manages, collects, settles, and inspects all taxes and ensures that only then will the “Catalan contribution to the State finances” be established based on the “cost of services that the State provides to Catalonia”, plus a contribution to “solidarity”. Esquerra baptized that pact as “fiscal concert” from the very beginning. High-profile Socialists like Josep Borrell also speak clearly about a “concert”. Right-wing parties and conservative-leaning media have gone even further, from the “Catalan quota” and “confederalism” to the traditional “Spain is breaking,” and from there, it’s a short distance to the Apocalypse of San Juan and nuclear mushrooms. This pact, in short, is ambiguous, like all agreements signed between two parties that are far apart. It has a couple of loopholes – there are no majorities to push it through, and solidarity must be negotiated between Catalan and Spanish Socialists – and everything suggests that it will be difficult to implement: it is an agreement designed, simply, to appoint Illa. Esquerra gets a juicy dividend in terms of storytelling and definitively gets rid of Junts. The PSC gains power after many years and seals the deal with the catchy phrase of “end of the process.” What do the PSOE and La Moncloa get? That answer was from the beginning more diffuse. Some voices simply speak of a possible trickery allowed by Esquerra, through the ambiguity and loopholes mentioned above. The most talkative point out that Sanchez tends to shoot first and ask later: he can say he has pacified Catalonia and made Illa president, and if it later proves difficult to gain political profit from that agreement – if the agreement is even applied – then we’ll see. Until yesterday, it was clear that the Catalan Socialists were relatively calm with that pact, and there was much more concern below the Ebro. No one has understood why Esquerra has been given all the space to set the narrative of the concert for weeks (beyond the fact that the presidency of Illa depended on ERC). No one quite understands what Sánchez’s grand plan is for the system of financing the regions, which is another way of talking about the reform of the state model.
María Jesús Montero, vice president of the Government, high-ranking member of the PSOE and chief responsible for the reform of a funding model that has long been expired, appeared on Wednesday from Rota to say that it is all a lie. There is no concert, and whoever says otherwise is lying. “It is not an economic concert, nor a typical reform of the funding system,” “and whoever says otherwise is lying.” So what is it then? A splendid neither yes nor no. After almost a month of silence, it is striking that Montero now comes out to refute Esquerra with such forcefulness. Exactly 20 years ago, journalist Ron Suskind coined the term “reality-based community” to describe the industries and ventures of the George W. Bush government in Iraq. “An advisor [to Bush] told me that people like me were in what we call the reality-based community, which he defined as people who believe that solutions come from the rational study of reality. I nodded and mumbled something about the principles of enlightenment and empiricism. He cut me off: the world doesn’t work like that anymore, he said. We are an empire now and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you study that reality, we act again by creating other realities that you can also study, and that’s how things are.” Eduardo Mendoza put it even more clearly once: “Life [in this case, politics] is like football: a few play and the rest comment.” ERC and the Socialists signed a pact with ambiguities and loopholes a few weeks ago, probably unenforceable, and Montero reinterpreted it yesterday to calm the Socialist family. The PSOE’s master plan for the territorial model is still unknown, if there is one. Those who thought that the pact between PSC and ERC was a kind of indicator in advance should reconsider after Montero’s denial and reread Suskind’s reality-based community. Illa is already president, and the unstable alliance between Socialists and Esquerra remains, despite the threats from the independence movement; those were the two objectives. For everything else, it’s worth remembering a Caribbean saying, “the most certain thing is who knows.”
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