The Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) has officially announced a general agreement with the Spanish government that will definitively allow the Socialists (PSOE) to get their annual budget passed. In exchange for votes in favour by ERC's senators, the party announced on Wednesday that an amount of 15 million euros will be allocated to audiovisual production in Catalan, Basque or Galician, which will be paid by the streaming platforms, regardless of where they have their headquarters - and would thus include Netflix and HBO Max, to name but two - and the creation of a fund to pay for dubbing and subtitling. ERC considers that these two agreements on these sensitive matters, the budget and the audiovisual law, "make it possible to provide stability, strength and constance to the negotiation process begun between Catalonia and the Spanish state, to continue with the opportunity that is open to work for the building of a democratic resolution to the political conflict".
Beyond going into the details of the agreement, a brief note: what at the beginning of the negotiation was supposed to be regulated by law through quotas that had to be complied with rigorously - that's how it was presented publicly and this is obviously one of the problems affecting the overall credibility of the agreement - has now been transformed into a percentage of 5% of the declared profits in European audiovisual production. It is not exactly the same, nor does it have the same strength, nor does content in Spanish have the same type of regulation. Experience shows that it is not good to leave these things at the mercy of events and that such strong satisfaction with the deal from the PSOE and the international platforms is, to say the least, suspicious.
I would like to trust Sánchez, but the truth is, I would be fooling my readers. And the international audiovisual platforms are not so different from what they were two decades ago when the then-president Jordi Pujol went to Washington to try to reduce their demands and reach an agreement to generalise the dubbing of most movies into Catalan. I followed that trip to the United States as a journalist and it was no contest: it was not a combat between equals but rather all the power was in the hands of Hollywood. Other formulas had to be found to alleviate the feeling of defeat through assistance for dubbing, and not quotas or penalties in case of non-compliance. But the truth is that, 20 years later, all that remains is that it was a bitter ending.
The president of ERC, Oriol Junqueras, who has been very close to the negotiations, had already let it be known a few hours earlier that the agreement would be good, but not as good as they would like. The basic idea of financing production in Catalan is, without a doubt, a way out and the concept should not be disdained. The economic figure seems insufficient and, depending on how it is managed, volatile. Anything other than a law setting it down so that it is impossible to reinterpret, when it is as ethereal as a percentage of profits, is a risk. In the first place because another government, another minister, or a different parliamentary situation may not work in its favour. Examples of this can be found by the truckload and there is no one better than the state solicitors for drafting documents that look like one thing before and end up quite different. The Celaá law, mentioned so many times in recent weeks, looks like the wandering ghost of Catalan language immersion more and more often these days.