catalan way

On Tuesday, the Catalan Government approved the International Protection Plan of Catalonia, which aims to protect people forced to leave their country for being persecuted. It is the first time Catalonia has its own legal instrument to face the issue of asylum seekers, displaced people and human trafficking victims. This new tool establishes the principles, measures and funding schemes to host and offer protection to people who fled their country due to a grounded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, membership of a social group, gender or sexual orientation. Among other things, the Plan encourages issuing new proposals to improve the legal status of these people, offer them better training, improve their reception, integration and participation.

The Catalan business community is deeply annoyed with the Spanish Government for not publishing transparent data on Catalonia’s fiscal contribution to the rest of Spain and therefore not recognising the fiscal deficit. The Spanish Finance Minister, Cristóbal Montoro, was supposed to issue the so-called fiscal balances last December but their publication was inexplicably delayed. Last Friday, in late January, Montoro announced the fiscal balances would no longer be calculated and published in the present form; instead, he would publish in March the “regionalised public figures” stating the costs of public services per citizen because the fiscal balances were “incomplete and incoherent”. However, on Tuesday, the Minister recognised that they were “correct” but “wrongly used” to support Catalan independence claims.

In appeal, the Spanish Supreme Court has sided with the family who requested their son to be taught in Spanish in school, alongside Catalan. Despite the Constitution not advocating pupils had “the right to be taught in Spanish”, but only stating they had “the right and duty to know Spanish”, a dozen families have requested their children to be taught in this language, turning to the judicial system. Whilst the Constitutional Court has validated on two occasions the Catalan schooling system, based on Catalan as first language of instruction, the Supreme Court ruled against it. The Catalan Government was offering individualised attention to these children, but the judicial decision states that Spanish has to be used for “the entire class of the pupil”, even though the rest of the pupils have not requested to be taught in this language.

The popular drama series by Albert Espinosa, based on his experiences of staying in a children’s hospital, has a pilot episode in development, with scripting by Margaret Nagel (‘Boardwalk Empire’) and supervision from Steven Spielberg. ‘Polseres Vermelles’, known to English-speaking audiences as ‘The Red Band Society’, has received positive feedback from its international distributors. An Italian adaptation, called ‘Braccialetti rossi’, started to be aired by RAI1 on January 26.  ‘Polseres Vermelles’ is an original project from Catalonia’s Public Television Broadcaster.

SITA Ibérica, a Catalan company located in Martorell, close to Barcelona, is one of the fourteen companies to have submitted a petition to destroy 500 tons of chemical weapons from Syria. But the submission was made without the prior knowledge of the Martorell City Council, which opposes the idea to destroy weapons in the Martorell area. The winner of the contest will be announced in early February by the UN body which is responsible for the destruction of the weapons.

Last year, Catalonia was the leading Autonomous Community in Spain for foreign tourism spending, which generated €14.02 billion, 13.4 % more than in 2012, according to the Tourist Expenditure Survey (EGATUR) of the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Energy and Tourism. The average spending per stay in Catalonia amounted to €903 per foreign visitor, 4.9% more than in 2012, while the daily spending was set at €120 per person, 1.4 % more than the previous year. Catalonia accounted for 23.7 % of foreign tourism spending in Spain, which reached €59.08 billion. Besides, tourism spending grew more in Catalonia than in any other Autonomous Communities in Spain and is well above the Spanish 9.6 % average increase over the previous year.

Alejo Vidal-Quadras, Vice-president of the European Parliament and famous for his strong Spanish nationalist stances, has quitted the People’s Party (PP) after 30 years of membership. Vidal-Quadras has joined the newly-created VOX party, a populist ultra-nationalist force defending a total recentralisation of Spain. The Europarliament’s VP criticises the Spanish PM Mariano Rajoy’s “diagnosis” and “solutions” for the “economic, institutional, moral and national unity” crisis the country is going through. However, after 15 years of being Euro MP for the PP, a few weeks ago it was revealed that the party did not want him on the list for the next European elections. Vidal-Quadras might lead VOX in the next electoral race.

The Born Cultural Centre has been selected as the venue to host the latest edition of the 080 Barcelona Fashion Week, from the 27^th until the 31^st of January where the newest collections for Fall/Winter 2014-2015 will be showcased. In the show’s 13^th edition, more than thirty designers and brands are ready to participate from Albéniz to Zazo & Brull to already established names such as Custo Barcelona, Desigual, Mango, Sita Murt, TCN or Punto Blanco. The fashion show will take over different spaces inside the Born Cultural Centre leading to the closure of the cultural and historical centre, which has closed its doors to the public from the 25^th to the 1^st of February 2014.

The Catalan Institute of Oncology (ICO) and Roche pharmaceutical company have signed an agreement stating that the Catalan public institute will pay for treatments against cancer depending on clinical results adapted to each specific patient. For now, the agreement provides that Roche will supply two drugs against the most common cancers, mostly breast and colon. According to the agreement, the probabilities of success will be thoroughly examined and if they meet the requirements, the Catalan Government will fully pay for the treatment. If not, Roche will assume the costs progressively according to the degree of success.

The People’s Party (PP) is holding a convention in Barcelona, with leading figures of the party, including PM Mariano Rajoy, to reject Catalonia’s self-determination and independence. On Friday, the PP’s Secretary General, María Dolores de Cospedal, stated that her party “will not allow Catalonia to split from Spain through machete strikes”. She added that “no one can bite off [a chunk of] a country” and that an independent Catalonia “will be born in bankruptcy”. In addition, the leader of the PP’s Catalan branch, Alícia Sánchez-Camacho, accused the Catalan President of “imposing” the self-determination vote. Besides, she emphasised that the PP “had suffered a lot” in the Basque Country, which is also happening in Catalonia. Within the convention there is a conference of a former PP member who chairs the Association of Terrorism Victims.

According to the Spanish Statistics Institute (INE), the 49.26 million overnight stays registered in 2013 amounted to a 1.82% increase on the previous year, thanks to a 5.34% rise for foreign guests. On the other hand, due to the economic crisis, the number of overnight stays for Spaniards fell by 6.82%. The number of visitors who stayed in one of Catalonia’s 2,122 hotels in 2013 reached a total of 16.240 million people, an increase of 0.02 % over 2012. The number of foreign guests also increased, by 3.62 %, while the number of Spanish visitors fell by 5.66 %. Catalan hotels registered a 55.55% occupancy rate, above the 55.51% posted in 2012.

Andreu Mas-Colell, Catalan Finance Minister, accused the Spanish Government of aiming “to undo” the system of Autonomous Communities. He also expressed his fear that the so-called ‘coffee for all’ system [the generalised devolution of the early 1980s that shaped the 17 Autonomous Communities] will become a ‘decaffeinated coffee’ system, implemented ‘in depth’. With this play on words, Mas-Colell was referring to a deep recentralisation and homogenisation process. Furthermore, the former professor of Economics at Harvard and Berkley, denounced “the budget treatment” that the Spanish Government gives to Catalonia as “totally unfair”. In this vein, he proposed that an international and independent body should calculate the fiscal balances between Catalonia and the Spanish State.

Catalonia ended 2013 with an unemployment rate of 22.26% and a total of 820,400 people unemployed, according to the Active Population Survey (EPA) for the fourth quarter. In late 2013 Catalonia registered 64,700 fewer unemployed people compared to the last quarter of 2012. At Spanish level, the unemployment rate was set at 26.03 %, with a total of 5,896,300 unemployed people. At the end of 2013, there were 69,100 fewer unemployed than in the last quarter of 2012. Furthermore, between September and December there were 8,400 fewer jobseekers in Spain. In the same 3-month period there were 20,100 fewer jobseekers in Catalonia. The Catalan Deputy Minister for Employment stated that these figures were “the best since the start of the crisis” since “for the first time, the number of employed has increased and the number of unemployed has decreased”.

Banc Sabadell, the second largest banking company in Catalonia, has ended 2013 with a net profit of €247.8 million, three times more than in 2012, after consuming €1,736.6 million in provisions and allowances for non-payments of loans, impairment of property and other financial operations. Due to the new regulations of the Bank of Spain on credit repayment and the acquisitions of other banking companies, the percentage of delayed or unpaid loans has climbed to 13.63%, 46% more than in 2012. Without the refunding operations, it would have been fixed at 11.13 %. The bank’s core capital, which is the main solvency indicator, stood at 12% and, with the new Basel III, it was set at 10.1%. Jaume Guardiola, CEO of Sabadell, believes that this trend can be the “turning point” of a crisis that was first anticipated when the results for 2012 were announced.

All the opposition parties except the Left-Wing Catalan Independence Party (ERC), which shares a parliamentary stability agreement with the governing Centre-Right Catalan Nationalist Coalition (CiU), have criticised the Catalan Government’s budget for 2014 – which amounts to €29.31 billion – for being “anti-social”. The Catalan Socialist Party (PSC), the People’s Party (PP) – which runs the Spanish Government, the Catalan Green Socialist and Communist Coalition (ICV-EUiA), the anti-Catalan nationalism party Ciutadans (C’s) and the radical left-wing and independence party CUP all opposed the budget proposal. The CiU and ERC defended the bill and have accused the other parties of “not presenting real alternatives”. The budget’s approval was delayed by a month after the PP appealed against the bill because it includes €5 million for a consultation vote.