The Catalan business fabric remains very strong and also very complex. For this reason, the organizations that seek to represent it live in a permanent tension with interests that do not always align. Their confrontations resemble literary feuds, like those of the families in Game of Thrones, the Lannisters and the Starks. They mostly occur under the radar and only rarely surface clearly.
Read more The debate over the silver chairs heats up the plenary session of the Cambra de Barcelona
One of the few spaces where this power struggle can be more visible is the Cambra de Comerç de Barcelona. Thus, in the midst of the procés, in May 2019, an independentist candidacy, Eines de País, won the elections to this institution by obtaining 31 of the 40 seats that were elected. One of their first decisions was to reduce the representation of large companies in the Cambra, the so-called silver chairs, which went from 14 to only 2 seats. The traditional system allowed these powerful companies to have a guaranteed vote in the Cambra and thus better balance the representativeness of the institution. Not for nothing does their weight in the Catalan economy exceed 35%. With the decision of Eines de País, only Criteria and RACC have a silver chair.
The new team, under the leadership of the current president, Josep Santacreu, elected in October 2023, set out to recover this representation of large companies, and this was approved by the executive committee of the Cambra last week. However, there are many reservations and today the plenary of the Cambra will have to ratify it. One of the employers’ organizations, Pimec, has mobilized against it and could derail the initiative, as it defends the current electoral system in which the size and turnover of each company do not matter.
The battle is fierce and the fact that the vote is secret makes a prediction difficult. The current management of the Cambra is right when it argues that the current system does not reflect well the weight of large corporations, but the all-or-nothing nature of today’s vote is very risky. Ideally, the traditional disagreements would have been set aside and a consensus sought, but it seems that this has not been possible.
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