The announcement by the Catalan minister for the presidency, Laura Vilagrà, that all exams will be repeated, after the civil service exam fiasco, when she was just a few hours away from her parliamentary appearance on the subject this Friday, is fundamentally a dyke of political containment. The wave of criticism that began over the weekend and then continued, of both the organizational chaos and the outsourcing of the exam process, forced a first firebreak to be cut, with the resignation of the director general of the Catalan civil service last Tuesday, a second firebreak to be added with her appearance in Parliament and a third comes with this announcement of the repetition of the oposicions, or public service entry tests, which has been accompanied by an announcement of monetary compensation for the 13,500 applicants due to the inconvenience caused.
This first announcement of the repetition of all the exams was inevitable, because the scandal has been of such magnitude and the chaos so enormous that there was no possible way to compartmentalize the problem by lowering the total number of those affected, as the implication seemed to be at the beginning. But with this decision made, the mother of all questions still remains in the air: why was it decided to outsource such an important process to a company - Cegas, from Madrid - instead of managing it from within the administration as it had always been done? And whether, in addition to terminating the contract, as has been announced, a legal procedure is being set in motion to claim compensation for the damage caused to the image of the Catalan administration, so that Cegas will also pay the monetary compensation announced by Vilagrà for the exam candidates?
The point is, if the test process is to be carried out now with the Catalan government's own staff, why wasn't the same thing done last Saturday? Admitting you are were wrong is a mark of intelligence, but in this case it is also shows that in the first place a wrong decision was taken, that it caused enormous damage, and the issue of whether or not the process could be outsourced was not fully considered given that now the announcement is that it will be repeated with staffing from civil servants. It is therefore not one mistake but a cluster of mistakes and now an ineffective remedy is sought after poor initial management. Was Catalonia's School of Public Administration asked for an opinion or to help? Because when it was created, in 1912, under the Catalan presidency of Prat de la Riba, this autonomous administrative body had among its objectives practical and professional training in matters of public administration. The school disappeared with the Franco dictatorship and was revived in 1979 under president Josep Tarradellas, always with the idea of resembling the ENA, France's National School of Administration, created in 1945 to democratize access to the high civil service through merit by competition, and dissolved by president Emmanuel Macron in 2021.
Civil servants are the basis of a good administration, be it municipal, Catalan or Spanish, and it is very important that the public have the highest of opinions of them, of their professional capacity and rigour, and of their commitment to their work. The administration should be the most interested of all in preserving this image, because at times public employees can easily become the target of widespread criticism based on ignorance or bad faith. For this reason, politicians must be very careful and in particular must be painstaking in their effects to ensure that their image, which also ends up being that of the country itself, is not degraded. Being exposed to the criticism that Catalonia is not even able to organize internal entry exams for civil servants, forces them to impose greater safeguards than were there previously. Because now the damage has been done and is, in part, irreparable.