The acting Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has warned this Saturday that Catalonia will not recover its potential in economic and well-being terms, and it will not be able to face its future until the independence movement accepts the "failure" of its political project, based on "lies and fallacies".
He delivered this message during his speech at the closure of the 'Foro La Toja' event in the Galician city of Pontevedra, in which he asserted that Spain is "spending too much talent, energy and affection" in "correcting problems that shouldn't have existed", such as the "crisis of social harmony in Catalonia".
Sánchez emphasized that the "grave error" of the Catalan independence movement was "not to understand the world we live in, to destroy social harmony and then go backwards, and waste the efforts and talents that should have been dedicated to solving the real challenges of Catalan society".
The acting PM emphasized that the Catalan economy has not been able to "recover the initiative" that it had before October 2017, "it hasn't recovered the growth rates, the business fabric or the levels of foreign investment, destroyed by the independence crisis." "When a false and exclusive idea of identity and democracy puts in danger the improvement of employment, juridical solidity, or the financing of health... it is obviously a failure, that is what the sovereignist project represents today," he declared.
Pedro Sánchez warned that "breaking the law, and asking citizens to disobey it is to repeat the mistakes of this already-scuttled political project," and he stressed that Catalonia "will not regain its potential well-being or face its future until the independence movement accepts reality, that its political project has failed."
In this regard, he criticized that the project is based on "fallacies and lies," and made several points to develop this: that "a minority cannot impose itself on a majority" of Catalans who, at the polls, "have embraced the idea of a Spain united in its diversity, and that "the best way to develop Catalan reality is within a constitutional Spain based on autonomous communities, and a federal Europe." "Identities that have been complementary throughout history cannot be uprooted (...), the challenge is not yes or no to independence, the challenge is yes or no to social harmony," he concluded.