President Pere Aragonès assured this Monday that the space for dialogue with the Government was “blocked” and, a day later, the Government has shown that relations between Madrid and Barcelona are or are not fluid depending on the forum in question. The Government and the Generalitat are currently finishing outlining the agenda of the Bilateral Commission that will be held this Friday in Barcelona, led by the Minister Isabel Rodríguez and the Minister Laura Vilagrà. But, with the other hand, the Government is urging the Government to immediately convene the dialogue table, implying that disregarding this forum now can generate a negative clash between governments for both.
“The negotiating table is the best instrument we have,” assured the Government spokeswoman, Patricia Plaja, who recalled that the commitment of both parties was to meet again at the beginning of the year. “We are in a temporary framework that allows us to still comply with the agreements. Neither the electoral processes nor the electoral interests are a justification [para aplazar la mesa]”, he has considered. Plaja has referred to the words of Aragonès in his MNAC conference to ensure that the opposite of a “democratic resolution of the conflict” is to give air to the reactionary forces of the extreme right such as Vox.
The Government spokeswoman has also tried to clarify some of the issues in the president’s speech that have raised blisters in the Junts partners. To begin with, her words about the pardons as “the first test of the State’s willingness to dialogue”, for which the leader of JxCat Jordi Sànchez has demanded that it be clarified if there was a negotiation to grant the pardon measures. “No one spoke of negotiation,” Plaja stressed, “it was the victory of the independence movement that forced the state to move.”
The spokeswoman has also referred to Aragonès’ request for the Supreme Court to withdraw the cases on Carles Puigdemont, which the former president himself has qualified. In the words of the spokeswoman, there is no news about this claim for the arrest warrants to drop, which is done in a general way “for all exiles and exiles.”
An unambitious agenda for the Bilateral
In parallel, the Government is already preparing the return of the Bilateral, which has not met since last August in Madrid. This time he will do it in Barcelona and from the meeting the Catalan executive is sure that he will be able to reach an agreement. However, the agenda revealed by the spokeswoman does not stand out for its ambition. At the moment, all there is is the transfer of minor infrastructure, such as the B-23 and B-30 metropolitan highways, the management of scholarships, an issue that has been going on for decades, or the transfer of the Turó de l’Home observatory , in Montseny.
The Government also wants to talk about the transfer of the Minimum Vital Income, an aid that was already claimed by the Generalitat through the courts, considering that it invaded Catalan powers, but that the Constitutional Court dismissed. All in all, the autonomous management of the IMV is a workhorse of the Catalan Ministry of Social Affairs, as it is also of the PNV in the Basque case. Until now, the Ministry of Social Security has always refused a total transfer and considers that the appropriate way is to reach an agreement to cede only the management.
Although the agenda is not closed, for the moment it does not seem that this Bilateral meeting is going to be the one that gives the big push to the transfer of funds for the Catalan management of the Rodalies service, the outskirts of Renfe. At this time, technicians from the Government and the Generalitat continue trying to reach an agreement on the amount of funds that should be transferred to Catalonia so that the Government could manage this railway service with guarantees. Until this figure is closed, it will be difficult for the transfer to advance.
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