Esquerra Republicana does not agree, committing to the transfer of personal income tax collection to the Generalitat, and now cools the possibility of negotiating next year’s accounts. The decision not to sit at the table comes after the party leader, Oriol Junqueras, and the head of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, did not reach an agreement on that point of the investiture agreement.
According to publication The Vanguard and ERC sources confirmed to this newspaper yesterday, Friday. Within the framework of that meeting it was impossible to reach a compromise on greater fiscal sovereignty, as the Republicans requested. The socialists hoped that the conciliatory message from Illa, who intervened in an unusual way in the coordination meeting of the general secretaries of the Government every Friday, would be enough to convince the parliamentary partners.
But they wanted, beyond a declaration of intentions from Illa, for a senior socialist official in Madrid to ratify the possibility of negotiating the transfer of management of personal income tax in the process of new financing. ERC, which had ready to debate a bill in that sense in Congress, finally withdrew it to try to approve it by another means: some amendments to the future autonomous financing law. In ERC they hoped to close the commitment of these amendments with the PSOE but this was not achieved.
“We are a government of agreements and a lot of dialogue,” say sources from La Moncloa regarding the failure of the meeting. Catalan, also needs ERC to overcome the absolute majority of 68 deputies in the Catalan Chamber. The Government aspires to have the Budgets in the first quarter of this year, with which it would have to close a global agreement this week.
Junqueras will address his party’s membership this Saturday, in a national council where he will also explain the progress of another portfolio that he has been negotiating with the central government: the creation of an investment consortium that will allow raising the level of execution of public works.
