“If we take a look at our most recent past and if we broaden our view to international developments, we will become aware that Catalonia has left behind the time of paralysis and indecision. Catalonia has left behind the time of division and confrontation. Catalonia today lives in a time of solutions to transform the country.” In the traditional institutional message of the President of the Generalitat for Sant Jordi, Salvador Illa has this year painted an optimistic picture of Catalonia, based on an analysis of the global situation, where armed conflicts have great weight, but also based on an internal diagnosis. Illa believes that “Catalonia is on the move and determined.”
The symptoms that lead him to this diagnosis are based, according to the message issued early this Thursday, on the fact that Catalonia’s situation “is good economically and morally,” and “Catalonia’s economic and moral thermometers indicate this to us,” he assured. On a social level, this good situation is due to the fact that “we are strengthening the social cohesion of the country,” but also “it is good because Catalonia has recovered the capacity to lead and propose to Spain, and because we have recovered the presence that corresponds to us in Europe and in the world.”
“Catalonia’s situation is good: it has recovered the capacity to lead and propose to Spain and the presence that corresponds to us in Europe and in the world”
Based on Catalonia’s “deep moral sense,” the head of the Government emphasized two areas, the first being the regularization of migrants undertaken by the central Government and to which the Government is “completely committed.” Appealing to the Pujolista maxim that “Catalan is whoever lives and works in Catalonia,” Illa stressed that “all people who live and work in our country deserve the same dignity, the same rights and opportunities, the same duties and responsibilities,” so that the nearly 150,000 migrants in Catalonia who will benefit from this process will be able to “contribute to the prosperity of the country with fullness. That is, with rights and duties,” he defended.
In fact, Illa compared this regularization process with the migratory process of the mid-last century in Spain. “Regularization is memory,” he pointed out, thus recalling “when it was our grandparents and great-grandparents who had to leave in search of a better life.”
Illa compares the Government’s regularization of migrants with the emigration of Spaniards: “Regularization is memory”
The other issue that marked his message was “the spiral of war.” On this matter, the president said he felt “fully proud of the moral stature we have demonstrated” in Catalonia, showing that “the most important numbers are not those of the price of oil, but of the lives that are being lost.” For the president, war is avoidable and it is necessary to put all energies into diplomacy and dialogue because “we are in time to avoid more deaths, more displaced people, more devastation.”
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Illa did not list the improvements his government has brought in the year and seven months he has been at the head of the Generalitat, but he did mention some areas, especially housing, where he assured that Catalonia is deploying “the most ambitious housing policy of any other autonomous community,” “building more public housing than anyone in Spain and managing to contain price increases.”
“Catalonia has a path of improvement ahead” in infrastructure, education, health…
However, the president also recognized that “Catalonia has a path of improvement ahead” in areas such as “infrastructure, fire prevention, classrooms and farms, neighborhoods and primary care centers, family homes and businesses.”
Finally, Illa referred to the Catalan language to boast about his management with the aim of improving the poor data experienced in its social use. “We are investing more than ever in the promotion and fostering of Catalan,” he assured, so that this year a record offer of 150,000 places to learn the language will be reached, he explained. And it is that “every new Catalan speaker is a new hope, it is the collective success of the country.”
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