Maragall performs U-turn on Catalan government reshuffle

Pasqual Maragall, the president of the tripartite government of Catalonia, the Generalitat de Catalunya, has announced that he has decided to back down from his stated intent to reshuffle ministers within the Catalan government. He has said that he now wants to keep all of the current ministers in their posts ‘indefinitely’, after reaffirming his confidence in them, and announced the grouping together of ministries into four macro areas.

In the past few days the ERC (Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya), one of Maragall’s partners in government, has warned the president that they may abandon the Executive if reform plans were to be carried out. The opposition party CiU (Convergència i Unió) also threatened Maragall with a confidence vote on the matter.

According to Maragall’s statement, the government ministries will be grouped together into four governmental areas ‘in order to improve coordination and control the coherency of the policies set forth by the government’.

The four areas were named as Social, Economic, Territorial and Policy and the ministries of each area would be expected to meet every two weeks. They could also be expected to count on the presence of the Catalan president himself, or of the Generalitat’s Prime Minister, during the meetings.

The decision communicated by President Maragall is in line with his willingness to ‘concentrate the actions of the government’ and of providing it with greater joint responsibility between the different ministries.

Maragall announced his decision after he and the three leaders forming the tripartite government - José Montilla (PSC - Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya), Josep Lluís Carod-Rovira (ERC) and Joan Saura (ICV - Iniciativa per Catalunya-Verds) - exchanged views about reshuffling the Catalan government during dinner in a Barcelona hotel last night.

The Catalan president summoned together this morning Josep Bargalló (Minister for Institutional Relations), Joan Saura, (Government Spokesperson), Joaquim Nadal (Minister for Territorial Policy and Public Works), and Ernest Maragall (Government Secretary), in order to make his intentions immediately known.

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