The beginning of the New Year has not changed the fact that only a parliamentary minority supports the Catalan government - just the 33 deputies from the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) out of the 135 MPs who sit in Parliament - but it has added an important extra problem to the crisis issues with which the executive ended 2023. That is, the pressure that the Catalan health system is under, due to the increase in cases of 'flu, Covid and other respiratory viruses. As in the classic scenarios for all these types of problems, the public suffers, while the different groups that have the obligation to work with patients blame the Catalan health department for a lack of planning and for not having foreseen measures to alleviate some of the bureaucratic tasks that fall on health personnel, such as, for example, the return to the mechanism for requesting sick leave from work through the certificate of self-responsibility.
At the same time, an indefinite strike by nurses is underway, and the Generalitat's health minister, Manel Balcells, did not succeed in calling off after a meeting on Thursday. The demands of the professionals are well known: as the association Metges de Catalunya has pointed out, the current situation is one of overloaded care in hospital emergency services and primary care centres, and that it was predictable. In addition, they denounce the under staffing that has existed for many years. The professional body Col·legi de Metges de Catalunya shares many of these same demands.
All this in a context in which expansive budgets has been approved in the department for the last two years. Under the baton of economy minister Jaume Giró, a big jump was made in health care allocation for 2022, rising to 11.2 billion euros, an increase of 1.5 billion euros. The following year, it rose further to 12.2 billion euros, a lower increase of 11.7%, in a budget approved by ERC and the Catalan Socialists (PSC). Summing the two years, the health budget has increased by 2.5 billion euros, an amount that should have been significant enough for some of the existing complaints to be alleviated.
The Generalitat's management will be more in question than ever; to face that with few MPs and without a stable majority is to add uncertainty to the concerns of the population
The truth is that it will be necessary to keep on investing more in health issues in the next budget than in 2023, and Pere Aragonès's government will have to evaluate whether it picks up the olive branch thrown by Junts to agree on a budget between them, ERC and the PSC or, on the contrary, it opts for the left-wing tripartite formula. As well it needs to be more rigorous in its decisions and to avoid conveying a sense of improvisation, the feeling you get when one day there is talk of returning to face masks, yet the very next day the emphasis is on vaccination, at the peak of contagions, when the communicative effort for the latter would have been needed weeks before.
If we add the problems of the PISA tests in education and the terrible drought affecting Catalonia, to mention two further key examples, the management of the Generalitat government will be more in question than ever. To confront that situation with few MPs of its own and no stable parliamentary majority is to add uncertainty to the concerns of the population.