The Govern and the Comuns are finalizing a budget agreement this Wednesday night to secure Salvador Illa’s first Budgets at the head of the Generalitat. Pending the final details, negotiations have progressed enough to assume that the agreement will be presented this Thursday at 11:30 a.m. With this step forward, the Govern will be able to approve the budget project on Friday in an extraordinary Consell Executiu, as intended to accelerate its parliamentary processing.
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The agreement has been finalized after a hectic day of contacts that ends a week of intense negotiations. With part of the Executive leadership displaced to Madrid for the State-Generalitat Bilateral Commission, the conversations have largely taken place remotely. The leader of the Comuns in the Parliament, Jéssica Albiach, had already indicated in the morning on Ser Catalunya that the Govern accepted one of her party’s main demands: the creation of a General Directorate of Housing Discipline to strengthen sanctions against rental fraud. During the morning, sources from the Comuns admitted progress on housing files, although they denied an imminent agreement, as Albiach had already anticipated the previous day. “If they are in such a hurry, let them validate our demands,” they said. The Govern conveyed throughout the day that its intention was to approve the Budgets on Friday, as planned for days. However, no one dared to take anything for granted because the Comuns had avoided calendars in the previous hours. “The Govern must respond,” they insisted. Contacts continued throughout the afternoon and differences were reduced over the hours.
Negotiations between the Govern and Comuns were activated last week, once Salvador Illa’s Executive closed its budget agreement with ERC. During the conversations between republicans and socialists, which the Comuns followed from the sidelines, Albiach’s formation conveyed a single demand: that housing not become a bargaining chip within the pact with Esquerra, considering it one of their main files. The pact between ERC and the Executive was built around the Orbital Rail Line.
Comuns and Govern have agreed to expand the budget agreement reached last February. The Comuns consider that this year’s Budgets cannot be approached as simple annual accounts, but as a “legislature agreement.” Therefore, the party demanded increasing from 1.85 billion allocated to housing policies to 2.5 billion, as EL PAÍS reported; and expanding the Pla de Barris allocation to 1.2 billion. The Comuns also demanded measures to facilitate the conversion of ground floors and offices into protected housing and mechanisms to increase the affordable housing stock. This Thursday both formations will offer the fine print of the agreement.
Despite public pressure from the Comuns, the Govern maintained its roadmap and had been working since last week with the expectation of approving the budget project this Friday. Albiach tried to cool those expectations and rejected the Executive’s “haste” both on Sunday and Tuesday. The leader of the Comuns even warned that the Govern “was mistaken” if it took for granted an improvement of the agreement with her formation. “We have conveyed to the Govern that the policies and resources allocated to housing will determine our position in the Budget vote,” she warned this Tuesday. A day later, after a hectic day in Parliament and Madrid, the agreement is imminent.
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