By RAPHAEL MINDER / The New York Times
When voters in Catalonia go the polls on Sunday, they will not just be writing another chapter in the long and complex saga of whether and how Spain holds together.
The most recent opinion polls suggest that the current Socialist-led coalition government in Spain's northeastern region will fall, a slap in the face for Spain's prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, a Socialist whose own popularity has plummeted along with the country's economic fortunes in the financial crisis.
The likely triumph of a Catalan nationalist party, Convergència i Unió, heightens the regional tensions that continually tug at Spain's fractious unity. As in other European nations, most notably Italy and Belgium, there is a gulf between northern regions like Catalonia, which spearheaded Spain's industrial revolution and remains home to some of its most successful corporations, and poorer southern areas like Andalusia.
Edward Hugh, an independent economist based in Barcelona, said that, while hard to measure, the consensus estimate among his peers was that Catalonia contributed the equivalent of 10 percent of its gross domestic product to supporting other Spanish regions, through taxes collected by the central government in Madrid.
With Spain particularly hit by the world financial crisis, and Catalonia itself grappling with a total debt that rose 20 percent last year to €30.5 billion, or $41 billion, burden sharing has become a burning issue within Spain, as has the question of who should collect taxes. Catalonia's limited fiscal autonomy has also contrasted with that of another prosperous northern region, the Basque Country, whose own government recently struck a new financing deal with the central government in Madrid, triggering loud demands from Catalonia for a similar treatment.
"The Basque Country has managed to get a credit rating that is better than that of Spain because it is fiscally independent," said Xavier Vives, economics professor at IESE Business School in Barcelona.
Instead, faced with tough refinancing hurdles, Catalonia was recently forced to issue €2.5 billion in domestic bonds for the first time since the mid-1980s, at a 4.75 percent yield, which was above that paid on similar Spanish government bonds.
Unless Convergència i Unió wins an outright majority on Sunday, however, the election is almost certain to be followed by intense horse-trading among parties hoping to join a coalition government. The consequences for Mr. Zapatero are also hard to predict, because he has maintained an ambiguous relationship with his Socialist counterparts in Catalonia, strained since a contested ruling last June by the Constitutional Court on a Catalan autonomy charter that had already been approved by Catalonia's 5.5 million voters and the national Parliament in 2006.
Some of the parties competing on Sunday, in fact, want Catalonia to split immediately from Spain and become a new member state of the European Union. "This election is a historic opportunity to take a decisive step toward independence," said Joan Laporta, who started his own party earlier this year after leaving the presidency of Barcelona F.C., one of the top soccer clubs in the world.
But rivalries between Mr. Laporta and other advocates of independence have splintered and weakened their movement. Catalan politicians also disagree over the level of popular support for independence.
Celestino Corbacho, who recently stepped down as one of Mr. Zapatero's ministers in order to return to Catalonia and help bolster the Socialists' prospects on Sunday, suggested that a better target would be to provide Spain with a stronger federal structure akin to that of Germany, in which Catalonia could stand out, because at most 25 percent of Catalans would vote for full independence should a referendum be held tomorrow. "Many politicians here are at least one step ahead of what people actually want," he said.
That, however, is partly because "the benefits of independence in the long term are huge but there are costs in the short term, which many people aren't ready to assume," argued Salvador García Ruiz, one of the founders of Col-lectiu Emma, an association promoting Catalan interests. He compared that reticence to the constraints of dieting: "I would love to be thinner, but am I really ready to eat only healthy food and start exercising immediately?"
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/24/world/europe/24iht-spain.html?_r=4&pagewanted=1&emc=eta1
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