The Government and the Generalitat took a new step this Wednesday in the architecture of Catalan self-government. After President Salvador Illa and the leader of ERC, Oriol Junqueras, sealed a key agreement yesterday to steer the Catalan budgets, the institutional machinery responded with unusual speed by holding a new meeting of the State-Generalitat bilateral commission to support the Generalitat’s deployment of powers, strengthen the shared management of infrastructures, and provide political and economic coverage to the pact between socialists and republicans.

The United States Department of Homeland Security collaborated with the Spanish police in the money laundering investigation that led to the case opened by the National Court against the former Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, according to a department spokesperson, a fact that already appeared in the order of the National Court judge who charged him with allegedly leading a network of influence peddling and money laundering, which represents a new setback for the left-wing Government, already harassed by other corruption scandals.

“Where does lobbying end and where does influence peddling begin?”. Gabriel Rufián brought to the Congress of Deputies this Wednesday one of those questions that have hovered over Spanish politics for years and that the Zapatero case has brought back to the forefront. The difficulty in delineating the boundary between legitimate influence and opaque practices. An activity that in Spain continues to operate in a wide gray area. The question, addressed to Pedro Sánchez during the control session, was not only seeking a response from the Prime Minister but also aimed to highlight one of the major regulatory gaps in the Spanish political system. Therefore, the Prime Minister chose to respond by referring to the lobbying law that Congress has been processing for months.

The demand from ERC regarding the management of the IRPF in Catalonia, which thwarted the previous attempt to approve the budgets of the Salvador Illa Government, has been put on hold for the moment, but, in the meantime, the republicans have tried to negotiate up to the limits of what is possible within the framework of the budget agreement to be announced this week to prepare the ground. Thus, the Catalan Tax Agency (ATC) will receive a clear boost with a specific program contract that will allow it to equip itself within a period of three years (2026-2029) with the human and technical resources necessary to assume all tax functions related to the management of the aforementioned tax for taxpayers in Catalonia.