If our politicians had listened to the people - something that unfortunately, based on my impression, many of them tend to do very little - and had taken advantage of these Easter days to travel around Catalonia, to any of the four corners of our magnificent country, they would have heard three things: firstly, a rumbling in the background, also containing some criticism towards them, about the alarming drought that has left an extraordinarily dry landscape as spring begins. Farmers are already thinking about water restrictions, about the out-of-season wildfires that have occurred, about the risk that many trees could even die and about a summer that they don't even want to imagine if everything remains the same as at present.
The counties of the Alt Urgell, Solsonès and Berguedà are no different from other arable or livestock regions in the country, and while they joke that now in Barcelona people have finally realized that there is a real problem with wild boars, whereas fifteen years ago they warned of this and no one paid any attention to them - "Now it's not the boars anymore, it's too late, the next problem is the deer, the roe deer and the chamois" - they tell you over and over again about the demagoguery that is being used towards them and they wonder what has happened to the investments to alleviate the drought. When you tell them that a drought summit was tried and failed, the first thing they ask you is "how many farmers were present?", and the second is "what are they spending the money on if there is no investment going on?". By the way, about the Catalan Water Association (ACA), and this is nothing new for this government: no one speaks well of it.
Everyone expects that this very Tuesday the Catalan government will announce economic investments to fight against the drought - investments, they repeat, not aid - and a new urgent call for the drought summit to be re-convened, although the farmers fear that this will not actually happen and the politicians will talk about their own agendas and, above all, will discuss issues that are not their priority. Secondly, if you have travelled around Catalonia these days, you will have seen that tourism has been giving significant joy to the sector that was nervously looking forward to an Easter like this. Not everyone has hung out the "Full" sign, but the satisfaction is quite widespread. Like it or not, tourism continues to be a great generator of wealth.
And, thirdly, perhaps, someone should have been aware about the seriousness of the rabbit plague affecting agriculture, especially in the always-forgotten regions of Lleida. It doesn't help that the Catalan Generalitat and the Spanish government delegation are interchanging responsibilities and powers with one another in order to be able to carry out more effective treatments against the hunting emergency. Their response sounds resounding: they clearly do agree, about the things that really interest them. And, of course, you have to keep quiet because there is some truth in what they say. Meanwhile, the cereal harvest in the counties on the plain of Lleida is in danger.
But the political agenda - that is, the agenda of the politicians - goes in a different direction. Maybe that's why the vote is so volatile and governments don't get pass marks from voters.