The way in which the Spanish minister of health, the Canary Islander Carolina Darias, dispatched the possible transfer to the Catalan government of the management of the Resident Hospital Doctors (MIR) - an issue that was debated in the bilateral commission meeting between the Spanish state and the Catalan Generalitat last Monday with the resulting creation of a subcommittee to study the issue - is much more significant than the issue of who holds the MIR competence itself. An assertion of superiority that was somewhere between dismissive and categorical in its refusal, when only 48 hours had gone by since the bilateral meeting, is not so much an affront to the Catalan executive as it is simply a sign of the attitude of the Pedro Sánchez government: they approve what they are interested in, such as the third runway at Barcelona's El Prat airport. As for the rest, study committees, analyses or projects are created and, who knows, some will mature, but after months if not years of negotiations.
We already said it on Monday: the third runway is above all a victory for the AENA airport operator in the "all or nothing" choice that it imposed on the Catalan government. It will be a shared victory only if the Catalan government not only secures the high-speed train connections between the airports of El Prat, Girona and Reus as part of the deal, but also achieves a broad political and social consensus in Catalonia, ensuring that the environmental impact is in line with the most demanding EU regulations and preserving the specific nature of La Ricarda and the entire protected area.
The effort that the Spanish ministry put into closing the agreement on El Prat and the failure of the bilateral commission meeting already gives a first clue: the Spanish government unblocks those items in which it has an interest, and muffles the demands that are more specific to the Catalan side. That is why, when it comes to the Spanish government, the best policy is always the same: keep your eyes wide open and your guard up, maintain the negotiation which contains the investment of 1.7 billion euros - which will amount to even more with the rail interconnection of the three airports - and do not accept a bad deal that mortgages the future.
If there is one thing that the minister Darias learned in her previous ministry, that of territorial policy, it is that in the negotiations with the autonomous communities and especially with Catalonia, the best strategy is to wait for the Popular Party to take a stand of radical opposition, for the medical community to then express itself, forcefully rejecting the transfer, and then to react to the ambience generated and deny the element itself, that is, the handover of the powers.
For those of us who have some experience in the area - because we already went through this before 2012 - it is exhausting and frustrating to see that nothing has changed. And that when to comes to making things disappear, they are still masters of magic.