The main business institutions in the territory will elect their leaders this summer. After the flight of venues and the blow of the pandemic, reactivating the economy is the mission entrusted to a Catalonia that seems increasingly dependent on Madrid. The phenomenon seems difficult to reverse.
Catalonia subjects most of its business representation to scrutiny in a month. Employers and economic institutions are submitted to elections at the beginning of summer with a mantra that has followed the community since the escape of social headquarters in 2017: that of decadence. At the moment it is more a comparative lament with the rise of Madrid and the loss of influence than a real fact to which the great leaders of the territory seem to have resigned themselves.
The region grew 5.8% in 2021 after the coronavirus and although Madrid overtook it in GDP since 2017, it did not abandon the path of growth. However, businessmen and the opposition did not hesitate to lament the stagnation of the economy and the loss of weight in the main firms in recent years. The businessmen put politicians in the spotlight and criticized the president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, for his fiscal policy or the refusal to expand the Barcelona-El Prat Airport and the mayoress of Barcelona, Ada Colau, for the limitations on activities such as tourism, have taken place in recent years. There are many who expect a change that, at the earliest, would take place in the municipal elections of 2023. For the regional ones, we must wait until 2025.
Before it came the turn of the businessmen. The employers’ associations Foment del Treball and Cecot, the Círculo de Economía and Barcelona Global had set their elections between June 27 and July 18. And except in the Círculo, where a continuist candidate is the favourite, not many changes are in sight at the head of the organizations.
In fact, there were no elections in Cecot –an employer’s association attached to Foment- nor in Barcelona Global. Cecot chose the metallurgical businessman Xavier Panés as the new president after Antoni Abad’s 17-year mandate. Meanwhile, the Barcelona institution chose Maite Barrera, president of the consultancy Bluecap for the next two years. There was no need to go to the polls.
Nor is there an alternative in sight for Josep Sánchez Llibre, president of Foment del Treball. The employers advanced their elections, scheduled for the fall, to July 18. The former CiU deputy does not currently have an organized opposition in the entity and the fear that the independence movement will try to form a parallel candidacy lost strength after the defeat of Eines de País (endorsed by the ANC) in Pimec.
More crumb has the confrontation between Jaume Guardiola, Javier Faus dolphin, and Rosa Cañadas in the Circle of Economy. With the appointment to the polls set for July 12, they will be the organization’s first elections. And the lack of custom soiled a procedure that the alternative candidate denounced for being, in her opinion, plagued with difficulties. In the pools, the former CEO of Banco Sabadell starts as a favorite after tripling the guarantees of his rival.
And the elections of the Barcelona Chamber chaired by Mónica Roca should not take place until 2023. However, the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) annulled at the end of June the votes in which Jaume Canadell, predecessor of the current leader, won the victory.
What to do with decay
Given the panorama, those in charge of reactivating the economic stagnation will be practically the same businessmen or their heirs. And for about a year something has been moving within the organizations. The catalyst: the expansion of the El Prat Airport, which at the moment has not gone ahead both due to the refusal of the Generalitat and due to the differences in the Spanish Government.
However, the institutions do not consider Aena’s investment of 1,700 million for lost. Last year, with the expansion still on the table, leaders of all political affinities met at the Esade business school to try to promote a project that did not come out.
And although the abandonment of the candidacy for the 2030 Barcelona-Pyrenees Olympic Games was a setback, victories such as the Copa América de Vela for 2024, the reactivation of tourism and the renewal of the Mobile World Congress filled the business lobby with confidence to reverse the slackness .
The pending issue is the return of the headquarters of the companies that left in the fall of 2017 after the referendum. None came back. And it doesn’t seem that any of them are willing to return despite the efforts of Foment del Treball to achieve it. “To be honest, if I had managed to get the venues to return, I would not have presented myself again,” admitted Sánchez Llibre the day he made the call for elections official.
The leader assured that the return operation will be one of the mainstays of the new mandate, although it was also one of the previous ones and was not successful. “We have not achieved it so far, it is true, but I am eager and excited, I know it will not be easy, but I do not think it is an impossible mission,” he concluded.
But beyond the Catalan companies that left, there is another phenomenon: the disappearance of the family business. In the last five years, companies such as Cirsa (Manuel Lao), Pronovias (Alberto Palatchi), Codorníu (Raventós family), Miquel Alimentació (Miquel family) and Pastas Gallo (Espona family) went from being controlled by leaders linked to the territory to being owned by of investment funds.
Facebook Comments
Disqus