They coincide at the Camp Nou in the award ceremony of the Pimec employers’ association, which asks for broad consensus and to give priority to the general interest.
The presidents of the central government and of the Generalitat, Pedro Sánchez and Pere Aragonès, exhibited unity when they coincided on Monday night at the awards ceremony of the Catalan SME employers’ association Pimec, which took place at the Camp Nou in Barcelona. Its president, Antoni Cañete, opened the event by warning them: he asked them to prioritize the general interest and to reach “broad consensus”, and not to get carried away by the excessive noise of a “minority”.
After thanking businessmen and SMEs for their high-mindedness during these last two years caused by the Covid-19 crisis and now, the war in Ukraine, Sánchez showed off being “in permanent dialogue with social agents and the rest of the institutions “. Proof of this, he maintained, are the labor reform, the new science law and the changes in Vocational Training.
“No matter how high and how hard the crises and disagreements are, it is worth betting on dialogue and public-private collaboration,” said the president, who also called for the strengthening of the European project and valued the unity that has been reached among the 27 around the Ukraine crisis.
Despite his appeal to the agreements, Pedro Sánchez also made reference in his speech to issues that separate him from his allies, such as the need to increase military spending. “You have to invest in defense, not to attack, but to dissuade,” he assured on the eve of the summit that the Atlantic Alliance will hold in Madrid.
President Aragonès and the mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, took advantage of the occasion to launch various reproaches at Sánchez. The most forceful was the Barcelona mayor, who asked for an investigation before the “unbearable images” of the tragedy at the Melilla border last weekend.
Pere Aragonès also seconded Colau’s request and also lamented the “chronic underfunding” of the Generalitat and the low level of investment in infrastructure since, according to data from the central Executive, in 2021 it stood at around 30% of the total budgeted.
Aragonès’s words came just after the difficult and unstable relations between the PSOE and the ERC, and between the central and Catalan executives, have begun to loosen. The Republicans chose to freeze them after the outbreak of the Pegasus case, the name of the computer program that the secret services used to spy on independence leaders.
On the other hand, and given the discomfort that the policies of Aragonès and Colau cause in business sectors, both took advantage of their speeches to lament the entrenchment of “catastrophist speeches”, in the words of the president. “The data in Barcelona is very good, the city model works,” the mayor proclaimed.
