The Spanish prime minister has just announced in Santiago in Chile that, before the year ends, he plans to hold a cabinet meeting in Barcelona. Pedro Sánchez's announcement substitutes those old promises which were fuelled by Madrid for a long time, like, for example, moving the Senate to Barcelona (luckily this never ended up happening), as former prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero proposed. Years later, when he was elected PSOE's secretary general, Sánchez took the idea up again, and in September 2015 he publicly promised in Gavà to move the upper chamber to Barcelona.
Then came Mariano Rajoy, already solidly installed in the Moncloa government palace, with his promise of a windfall of millions to improve the local train network. That was uncritically publicised in the written Catalan press (and criticised in the Spanish) and that, like other promises, was utterly forgotten about.
In this case, it must be acknowledged, Sánchez has been much more modest: he's only promised a cabinet meeting in Barcelona. There's no tradition since Spain became a democracy of such meetings in Catalonia, and nor do I remember them ever being held out of Madrid. General Franco, however, did use to meet with his government in Barcelona with a certain regularity. He held as many as eight cabinet meetings here, the last in June 1970. The press of the time, as normal, would highlight them with great typographical ostentation. And, almost always, the blueprint was the same: the announcement of investments in the territory which were the precursor to historic decisions for the Catalan people.
There was a lot of smoke, and it's recorded, for example, that in the last one, which was held in the Pedralbes palace, Franco guaranteed a Universal Exhibition for 1982. What there ended up being was a football World Cup in Spain, with the Naranjita1 as mascot.
Now Sánchez will bring the cabinet to Barcelona, and it won't be to either agree a referendum, nor announce the release of the political prisoners, unjustly held in pretrial detention for months. In other words, it will be for propaganda.
Translator's note: Naranjita, literally "little orange", was a cartoon orange dressed in the Spanish national team's kit.