The Catalan government is looking for partners to agree on the 2024 budget. The Esquerra executive is openly confronting its former Junts partners and hopes that the PSC can unfreeze the accounts by copying the tripartite operation (ERC, Socialists and Commons) that it already served a few months ago to prepare this year's budgets to approve. The PSC's First Secretary, Salvador Illa, has expressed his intention to “make it easy” for the government, but warned that negotiating the 2024 budgets “makes no sense” if there are agreements for 2023 Compliance is still pending. “The negotiations were very complex, I am sorry that at this point some of the commitments were not fulfilled,” Illa lamented this Monday in an interview on SER’s HERE Catalunya. The opposition leader asserts willingness to cooperate, “we almost have tendonitis because we have come so far,” but criticizes Esquerra’s management: “It’s four wasted years.”
Illa rules out that the “worse the better” strategy is effective in weakening political rivals and says he is open to a rapprochement with the government: “The will of the PSC has always been to help the country , to do better.” In this sense, he criticized the absence of the Minister of Economy and Finance of the Generalitat, Natàlia Mas, at the first meeting of the Council for Fiscal and Financial Policy (CPFF) of this legislative period, an absence that is his In my opinion “it's a mistake”.
This Monday the Political, Fiscal and Financial Council (CPFF) will meet in Madrid to approve the new deficit path that the Autonomous Communities will follow with a view to the 2024 general state budget, which the government wants to have ready in the first quarter of the year. Next year. The Generalitat reported last Saturday that Minister Mas would not attend the meeting because the CPFF is “not a debating body” and that she sent the Catalan representation to her number two, the Secretary General for Economy, Josep Maria Vilarrúbia, accompanied by the general Budget Director Esther Pallarols will delegate.
Illa regretted Mas's absence and considered it the minister's “duty” to participate “personally” in these forums: “You have to be in multilateral organizations,” she said. “It is not good not to sit at the table to defend the interests of the Generalitat government and all Catalans. It is true that he sends two people from his department, but if it were my responsibility I would ask the council of my government to be present and explain with complete clarity and expertise the position of the Generalitat of Catalonia,” he noted .
According to Illa, “autonomous financing is important enough for the department head to participate in it.” He also stated that the Socialists would help the government with financing as much as possible and defended a “fair” model, but without “privileges” for Catalonia.
The First Secretary of the PSC calls on the President of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, to convene the party table to address “the specific problems” of the citizens of Catalonia such as drought, education, renewable energy or health. Illa criticizes the fact that in recent years there has been “a lot of talk about referendums, self-determination and independence” but “too little” about the remaining issues, which in his opinion has pushed Catalonia “into the background”. in renewable energy, education or without current investments in infrastructure to combat drought.
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