Catalan nationalists' tough verbal line

The prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, has said that the cutbacks undertaken by the Catalan regional government of Artur Mas show the road to be followed. Between the conservative Catalan CiU bloc and the center-right Popular Party (PP) there is a communion of ideas: the crisis is to be fought with austerity, and the economy will pep itself up without increased fiscal pressure, especially that of direct taxes. However, CiU's separatist rhetoric prevents these relations from going smoothly. The fact is that both parties need one another. CiU lacks a clear majority in the Catalan parliament to implement its cutbacks; and in the Spanish parliament the PP, with CiU's votes, would broaden its base of legitimacy. One of this duo's first trials will arrive with the debate on the Catalan budget for 2012, which has come up this week in the regional parliament. The PP, as if responding to CiU's negative vote in Rajoy's investiture, is now raising objections: to a new payment for pharmaceutical prescriptions, and to the tourism tax.

One obstacle to smooth PP-CiU relations is the latter's recurrent use of the term "looting" in reference to something quantifiable, and negotiable: the fact that Catalonia has unfavorable fiscal balances. CiU's moderate spokesman, Josep Antoni Duran i Lleida, said in Rajoy's investiture: "Catalonia is weary of being made poorer by belonging to Spain." And then the CiU was surprised to encounter no friendly gesture on the prime minister's part that would facilitate their abstention. You cannot employ wounding terminology, and then expect praise and concessions. And less so, when this occurs in a chamber where the PP has a clear majority, and when CiU lacks a sufficient majority in the Catalan parliament.

CiU is playing with dangerous verbal fireworks, centered on the idea of a fiscal pact "along the lines of the Basque Concert" (a unique tax-sharing agreement between the Basque and Spanish governments) as the only way to resolve the difficulties in financing and, indirectly, to legitimize the harsh cutbacks being implemented in Catalonia. It thus nourishes the idea that the crisis in Catalonia is due to the meanness and broken promises of the central government, an assumption which is very popular with an eye to the gallery, but which sows the seeds of confrontation in Catalonia's relations with the rest of Spain.

This outlook also generates expectations which can only lead to new frustrations, as is now becoming apparent in the Mas government's sudden drop in popularity. According to a survey by the Center for Opinion Studies (CEO), citizens give his government a rating of 4.96, the lowest score received by a Catalan government since the times of Franco.

The Catalan government also persists in blaming the enemy without, while refusing to see the faults within: the previous withholding of income tax in payments not yet received by public employees is something that CiU would have raised a howl to Heaven about, had it not been their own idea.