Halfway through the term, Salvador Illa deserves a total fail. That is the idea defended by Junts per Catalunya, which this Friday made an evaluation of the first phase of the PSC government and the conclusion is that “Illa has sunk Catalonia.” In a statement at the doors of the Parliament, Mònica Sales, president of the JxCat parliamentary group, denounced that the Government has run aground on a succession of issues that are the backbone of Catalonia, such as infrastructure and mobility, housing, and education. “When Catalans need it, this Government is not there,” Sales reproached. Junts attacks the PSC for its shortcomings in management, “they are incompetence turned into a method,” and accuses it of being folded to the mandates imposed by Pedro Sánchez: “Illa is not the voice of Catalonia in Madrid, he is the voice of the PSOE in Catalonia,” Sales stated.
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The president of the Junts group in Parliament stated that “Catalonia is worse than two years ago” and considers that the root of the problem is that the Government is “absent in the face of the problems of Catalans” and is “obedient to the interests of Madrid.”
The axis around which the discourse of the main opposition group revolves is that the president of the Generalitat “worsens everything he touches.” “He has collapsed infrastructure, degraded public services, strangled the middle and working class with more taxes, set back Catalan, and even deteriorated coexistence,” Sales lamented.
Junts hammers on the idea that during the campaign the PSC advertised itself as a guarantee of “good management” to overcome years of pro-independence governments and, in practice, problems grow. Sales focuses on the “collapse” of infrastructure such as the railway service or the AP-7. “Rodalies is no longer a public service, it is a Russian roulette,” Sales criticized, who considers the highway “a permanent bottleneck.”
In the same tone, she disparaged the Government’s management in Education, “the school year will start as it ended, with strikes,” and maintained that there is a lengthening of waiting times in healthcare or in dependency aid.
Junts, which is waiting for the return of its leader Carles Puigdemont to Catalonia to materialize, “we are cautious,” Sales said, defends that the party is the alternative to overcome the “anesthesia” that numbs Catalonia. “Catalonia is falling apart and Illa watches it silently from his office without asking anything from Madrid.” In its argument, Junts emphasizes the idea that the State’s investment data in Catalonia reveals an expenditure of “162 euros per inhabitant, while in Madrid it is 452 euros per inhabitant.”
