Early on Sunday evening, president Pere Aragonès completed a new Catalan government that has two main characteristics: firstly, it goes beyond the ranks of the Catalan Republican Left (ERC), incorporating ministers who can be spotted in the historic photo albums of the Catalan Socialists (PSC), Convergència (CDC) or Podemos in the past. Secondly, it begins life having to surmount enormous parliamentary difficulties if it is not to succumb from the start. To the loud calls from Junts to call elections or submit to a confidence vote, the parliamentary leader of En Comú Podem (Comuns), Jéssica Albiach, added her voice this Sunday, and, employing a tone with ERC that was unusual, affirmed that the new executive is born dead.
With a much more cautious and gentle attitude, the leader of the PSC, Salvador Illa, continues to hold out his hand to Aragonès to help pass the Catalan budget. Every time he does so, ERC sends him away and even party president Oriol Junqueras has stated that the option of extending the 2022 budget will be used before allowing the 2023 accounts to be passed by the Socialists. The new minister of Economy and Finance, Natàlia Mas, an old acquaintance of the department, where she was a senior official when it was run by Junqueras and Aragonès, will find herself holding the key hot potato, whose fate will show whether the government's vital signs are reasonably sound or whether, in fact, the administration is on the respirator and awaiting the coup de grace.
The composition of the new government managed to surprise through its incorporation of ex-Socialists and ex-ministers Quim Nadal - seven years with Maragall and Montilla, before he tore up his Socialist party membership in 2015 - who will lead the Research and Universities portfolio, and Manel Balcells, who will be head of Health. As well, the long-time deputy in the Spanish Congress for the centre-right Catalanist party, Convergència, between 1996 and 2019, Carles Campuzano, who then served in the PDeCAT until 2020. And the former general secretary of Podemos in Catalonia, Gemma Ubasart, currently a professor at the University of Girona.
Beyond putting into practice his political commitment to broadening the base, it is clear that, deep down, what is being shown is a takeover bid aimed at the Comuns - Gabriel Rufián in Santa Coloma will hardly win votes from the PSC, but he could harm the Comuns and help ERC win the Barcelona provincial authority, the Diputació - with its main objective being to take the mayoralty of Barcelona, something it could not achieve in 2019 despite being the largest political force at the polls. The implosion in Junts that ERC triggered by dismissing the Catalan vice president Jordi Puigneró also had another bullet in the chamber: remove Xavier Trias from the candidacy for the mayor of Barcelona and make the way easier for Ernest Maragall. Trias, despite the fact that the current political scenario is not the one he likes the most, far from stepping aside and resigning from the list, is looking very favourably on running rather than passing up the race.
This Tuesday, the second Pere Aragonès government will meet for the first time and it is the start, 20 months late, of the effect that perturbed the results of February 14th, 2021 and forced a coalition executive between ERC and Junts: the first place achieved by the PSC. The fact is that that initial option that was never put into practice made sense if the arithmetic added up. Right now the numbers don't add up and it seems that ERC has the entire parliamentary arc against it.