La Gestació del pacte

Josep C. Verges

The general elections of 1996 did not provide a clear majority for the winning centre right Popular Party. Two months later all agreement to govern was reached with the Catalan nationalists. The agreement was then extended to the Basque Nationalist Party and the Canarian Coalition. The surprising U-turn for the Popular party included its position on financing the Autonomies or states. The Government of Catalonia has been the poor financial relation of the new democratic Spain. The initial pact of democracy wanted to assimilate Catalonia and the Basque Country by extending autonomy to all Spanish regions. This had been lost with the demands on Catalan solidarity that no other Administration provided. The initial democratic pact seemed to have become merely a only better social distribution to the backward regions. The new agreement, whose financial proposals were written by this author and are published here for the first time, returns to the initial ideas that established democracy ...