“We leave as we arrived.” “We left empty-handed”. “We came without proposals and we leave without answers”. “Without agreements or commitments”.
These phrases pronounced by several regional leaders of the PP at the end of the Conference of Presidents held this Friday in Santander summarize the outcome of the debate between Pedro Sánchez and the heads of the communities. Or more than a debate, they regret, a series of monologues that in the midst of the political tension in Spain and the total confrontation between the Government and the PP, has prevented any agreement almost three years after the last meeting of this type, the one held on the island of La Palma. There, the then president of the Generalitat of Catalonia, Pere Aragonès, avoided taking the family photo with the king, but in the Cantabrian capital, his successor, Salvador Illa, has been present and this has led the Government to emphasize, in the absence of agreements, the recovery of full institutional normality. Moreover, Catalonia, and specifically Barcelona, will host the next meeting of the Conference, which will be the 28th, after the proposal in that sense made by Illa and which has been supported even by the president of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso.
Cold greeting
She, according to those attending the meeting and faithful to the succession of political clashes with Sánchez (with whom she has only crossed a cold protocol handshake at the beginning), has starred in one of the most critical interventions flatly rejecting the intentions of the Government on the singular financing of Catalonia and the cancellation of part of the debt not only to this territory, but also to other communities. The President of the Government, in the main announcement of the summit, has advanced that in January the Fiscal and Financial Policy Council will be convened to deal precisely with this cancellation of the regional debts. But the general response, both from Ayuso and the other ten presidents of communities governed by the PP, is that this Council should be dedicated to another matter: the search for an agreement to renew the regional financing model. The coincidence is that this is urgent. Some socialist presidents also believe so, and the president of Castilla-La Mancha, Emiliano García Page, has even suggested that within three months the Government should present a framework draft on the reform of this system. The debate on this issue has absorbed the protagonism of the day despite the fact that other headings have been discussed, such as the distribution of migrant minors among the communities while awaiting an agreement, health or housing.
Pre-written script
In spite of everything, the absence of agreements (a script that seemed to be written in advance) is not synonymous with failure for the Government. This has been affirmed by the Minister of Territorial Policy, Ángel Víctor Torres, in charge of taking stock of the Conference on behalf of the Executive and who has assured that he left it happier than the way he entered. The discrepancies, he said, have been accompanied by a good tone. But that has not dispelled the feeling of coldness of the meeting to which García-Page has alluded, jokingly assuring that he has seen the atmosphere very cold until heaters have been put. Sanchez has contributed to this atmosphere being quite inflexible with the time of intervention by some presidents, who saw on a stopwatch how the ten minutes each one had were being consumed. However, on the socialist side, even in the positions of some popular barons a glimmer of hope to reach agreements in the future is seen. Among them is not Ayuso, who believes that it shows that two PP coexist, the one that she supports and another more moderate one with representatives such as the president of the Xunta, Alfonso Rueda. The Sánchez-Ayuso confrontation is the most vivid example of how the Government-opposition relationship has developed in this year that is coming to an end. Both have shared with the rest a menu that they have been able to taste without stopping the meeting and composed of pasiego marriage (anchovy on a toast of sobao), spider crab meatballs and roast secret. For dessert, cheesecake. Or fruit as an alternative for the lactose intolerant. Five hours of meeting to show disagreements. Five hours to confirm an intolerance that seems to be entrenched between the Government and the autonomous regions of the PP.
