The agreement that the Catalan Socialists (PSC) and Together for Catalonia (Junts) have reached to tie down the Catalan government in Parliament on the drought issue, forcing it to take initiatives it did not foresee, places the Pere Aragonès executive in a difficult situation over an electorally complicated matter: either it joins the sociovergència* majority and puts on a brave face for the bad weather, or it makes it clear that it is in the minority, votes against the plan and give greater emphasis to the fact that, on a key issue such as the fight against the drought, it is the opposition who is calling the shots. The Socialists and Junts have played their cards with a certain shrewdness: they have reached acords with each other and agreed the measures with the companies in the sector, the ones who know most about the current deficit and what the priorities are, as well as with the affected sectors, fundamentally, the farmers, many of them small or medium-sized owners who will need direct aid and also run the risk of losing their harvest - some of those who are growing cereals, for example, already take that loss for granted - watching fruit trees die, something that could still be avoided. All this, at a time when the Catalan government has expanded from 224 to 495 the number of municipalities in a situation of Exceptionality.
Although it is not until Thursday that the Junts legislative proposal is to be voted on, and under an exceptional, single-reading procedure to speed up the process as much as parliamentary legislation allows, the cards have already been dealt in the sense that Junts has made public the measures it previously agreed with the Socialists and the investment of 5 billion euros to boost water infrastructure, some of which will be immediate. To sum it up, the urgent measures relate to boosting the reuse of water, giving it a new life - the expansion of the biological wastewater treatment plant at El Prat and an expanded use of the Sant Feliu de Llobregat water regeneration station - while other actions in the medium term, which will not solve the current problem, are centred on the construction of desalination plants that need significantly more time, since the results will not be seen for four years.
To the Republican Left (ERC) government, the worsening of the drought and the debate on it in Parliament - a consequence of the failure of the summit called by president Aragonès on March 31th - has coincided with the controversy over the civil service entrance exams in which more than 13,000 Generalitat employees turned up to consolidate their positions as members of the Catalan public administration and a major scandal occurred because the company contracted to do the job was unable to manage the macro-exam process properly: failing to guarantee the confidentiality of the exams, providing insufficient space to hold the tests and a long list of other failings. On this, the Pere Aragonès government reacted with the greatest possible speed, sacking the civil service director, Marta Martorell, due to the chaos generated - once they confirmed the errors that had been made - and a complete lack of oversight over the largest number of civil service candidates ever called to entry exams by the Catalan administration. Beyond the lack of experience of the now ex-director, it is clear that the responsibility in these cases always goes, politically speaking, both upwards and downwards, and the opposition parties are trying to take advantage of that, putting the Catalan presidency minister, Laura Vilagrà, on the ropes.
Unlike the issue of the drought, here it is not only the PSC and Junts demanding responsibilities from the government beyond the dismissal of the civil service head, but also the other parliamentary parties, both on the right and the left. Although parliamentary activity usually stops during election campaigns, we will have to wait and see what happens this time and if Parliament is called together just before May 28th in order to demonstrate the fragility of the executive. The Republican Left executive will need to find allies that at present it cannot count on, if it does not want these last three long weeks until election day to become eternal.
*Translator's note: "Sociovergència" is a portmanteau term in Catalan referring to political alliances between the (Catalan) Socialists and the now-defunct centre right Catalanist party Convergència, which occupied a political space close to that of the current Junts (Together for Catalonia).