“I want to assure you that this government will govern for everyone, it is a real obsession,” Illa said during the swearing-in of his advisers (ministers). The Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSC, the regional branch of Sánchez's PSOE) won regional elections on 12 May, but without an absolute majority of 68 seats in the assembly.
After several weeks of negotiations, Illa managed to get the support of the small far-left party Comuns – a member of the Sumar platform, which supports the government of Sánchez in Madrid, and especially that of the ERC, the more moderate of the two major separatist parties in the region.
Having therefore an absolute majority of mandates, Illa could be elected president of the “Generalitat” (Catalan government) on Thursday by the assembly. The fact that the Socialists were able to establish a government in Catalonia validates, for Sánchez's entourage, the prime minister's strategy of reducing support for Catalan separatism by offering concessions.
Full fiscal control
The most significant of these is a controversial amnesty for those involved in a unilateral bid for independence in 2017 that caused Spain's worst political crisis since the return of democracy. To convince the ERC to back her, Illa also had to commit to giving Catalonia full control over taxes collected on its territory, one of the main demands of pro-independence parties for decades.