Pedro Sánchez makes a move and puts the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) in check: he gives the so-called dialogue table between the Spanish and Catalan government a massive dropkick down the road, and it will now take place in spring. The Spanish government has ill-treated the president of Catalonia in a last-ditch attempt to drag ERC into the vote to validate the labour reform decree before Wednesday's vote in the Congress of Deputies. Sánchez has loaded his cannon and aimed it at Barcelona's Plaça Sant Jaume, where it was still expected last week that the meeting between the two governments could take place early this month, before the elections in Castilla y León. The Spanish government, aware that its parliamentary ally, in its rivalry with Together for Catalonia (Junts), is betting a large part of its votes on the dialogue table is apparently willing to send it into conflict if its deputies do not line up alongside the PSOE and Unidas Podemos.
All this on the same day that another of the mantras heard in the Moncloa government palace and among Spanish unionism in general went straight down the plughole: that Catalans need to forget about independence and return to the infrastructure issue. In other words, the public works scheduled for Catalonia in the annual budget as an alternative to the demands for a state of its own. Well, an organization that isn't very likely to be in cahoots with the pro-independence parties - employer's association Foment del Treball, often used by Sánchez on his trips to Catalonia to send his false conciliatory messages - presented a devastating report on Monday with the following title: "The state's investment deficit in infrastructure in Catalonia reaches 35 billion euros in twelve years." To give you an idea: the Catalan government's budget recently passed by Parliament for the year 2022, and which provides for an exceptional increase in social spending, amounts to a total of 38.1 billion euros and has increased by 5.6 billion euros with respect to the last accounts approved by the Catalan chamber, in 2020.
It is appalling to think that the total sum that the Spanish state has retained over the last 12 years because of the infrastructure deficit alone - and we are not talking about the fiscal deficit, which is much higher - is approaching the entire total of Catalonia's own budget for 2022. And it exceeds that of 2020. Can anyone imagine what could be done if this year, for example, as compensation for what has not been delivered in infrastructure, it was paid all at once? It would be like having two budgets in one year. In the last two years analyzed, 2019 and 2020, with Pedro Sánchez already in the Moncloa palace - where he arrived in June 2018 - this deficit has increased by about 7 billion euros. And here's another figure: of the 2.1 billion euros that can be regionally defined as pertaining to investments in Catalonia in 2021 in the Spanish government budget, the figures show that the proportion actually invested in the first half of last year was 13.3%.
There is no policy for Catalonia from the PSOE. The only thing that exists is a rejection of holding a negotiated referendum and a total opposition to the independence of Catalonia, with the police and judicial repression that is necessary to fulfill the objective of preventing it. This is the Spanish government's menu for Catalan politics in the coming years and will remain unchanged until a different political situation is seen in Catalonia, when the disunity of pro-independence parties benefits, above all, its political opponents. With less than two weeks to go before the Castilla y León election on February 14th, the cards for these twelve months have already been put on the table. Perhaps the puppet theatre has already been knocked to the ground and the whole strategy needs to be rebuilt from different elements.