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Catalonia's tax burden: 'If you put up with it, they keep taking your money'

Voters who believe their taxes are funding poorer, 'lazy' regions in Spain are rallying to the separatist cause
Independence rally Barcelona
A pro-independence rally in Barcelona this year. Catalonia has built up Spain's biggest regional debt and had to ask for a bailout from the central government. Photograph: Gustau Nacarino/Reuters

When Josep Rovirosa, a 50-year-old Catalan bank worker, drives along the motorway into Barcelona he often arrives at the toll gate with rebellion in mind. "I drive up and say 'good morning, I'm not paying'. Then I drive on and they take my number plate." Fines, he expects, will start coming soon.

Rovirosa is part of a growing campaign of disobedience on toll motorways, which many Catalans see as a symbol of how they must pay for services that other Spaniards get free – made worse by a nagging suspicion that their taxes support lazy lifestyles in poorer parts of the country.

"Almost all motorways in Catalonia have tolls, but our money goes to building toll-free roads across the rest of Spain," says Rovirosa. "We have so many grievances. If you just put up with it, they keep on taking away your money."

Bus driver and General Workers union activist Carlos Heras agrees. When he travelled to Madrid to join a protest against austerity measures across the country recently, the first thing he did was check the price at parking meters in the Spanish capital. "You see," he says. "It would be twice the price in Barcelona."

Even leftwingers such as Heras think Catalans are being starved of money to subsidise other parts of the country that do not deserve it.

As fierce austerity measures hit local health services and schools, anger about money has helped tip a majority of Catalans questioned by pollsters into backing independence, with support leaping from 43% to 57% in 15 months.

"More than 80% think Catalonia is underfunded," says Jordi Sauret, of Feedback pollsters. "That idea is now deeply entrenched."

On paper Rovirosa and Heras are right. Catalonia's fiscal deficit – the difference between the money it pays to Madrid and, after taking some funds to pay state costs, the money it gets back – is €16bn, or 8% of the region's GDP, according to the Catalan government.

Eighty per cent of Catalans tell pollsters that they pay too much and get too little back from the Spanish state.

At separatist rallies, the poorer regions of Andalusia and Extremadura are held up as places where lazy people live off the hard work and taxes of Catalonia. Almost one-third of workers in the Andalusian province of Cádiz are on disability pensions, says Alfons López Tena of the Solidaritat Catalana party at a rally in the coastal town of Mataró. "Spain also steals our pension money," he adds. "We pay Swedish-style taxes but have Senegalese-style public services."

Catalonia has some of the highest income tax rates in Europe. It has also built up the biggest regional debt in Spain and, with its bonds given junk status by ratings agencies, has this year had to request a humiliating bailout from central government in Madrid.

"They say 'if we were independent then we would be solvent', but they are wrong," says the budget minister, Cristóbal Montoro, of the conservative People's party.

Economists argue about whether the cost of independence would be higher or lower than the €16bn a year, and whether Catalonia could finance its debt on the global markets. But all parties at Sunday's regional elections, including the Catalan branch of prime minister Mariano Rajoy's People's party, argue it deserves a bigger slice of the tax cake.

Yet the Balearic Islands and the Madrid region have even higher fiscal deficits, and they are not threatening independence. So what happened to solidarity and redistribution of wealth?

"If the left has talked about lowering income tax, why shouldn't it talk about this too?" asks Miquel Iceta, who heads the Catalan Socialists' Rafael Campalans thinktank. His party, which proposes a new federalist constitution for Spain, is heading for its worst result at these elections.

"If Catalonia is third in the list of those who prove tax income, it can't appear in 10th position among those who receive money back to pay for its expenses," says Joan Saura, a former Catalan government member from the left-leaning Initiative for Catalonia Greens party.

But he criticises the way the regional government of President Artur Mas, which has some tax powers, raises money directly in Catalonia. "In Catalonia you can inherit €5m without paying any tax – but if a child takes their own lunch to school they still get charged €3," he said.

Mas says that money alone will not fix the divide with the rest of Spain. "Part of the problem would go, but not the whole problem," he says. "If we resolve the fiscal deficit and still do not have political decision-making power, then we haven't fixed it all."

Saura disagrees. "Only about 20% are real separatists, but 30% or 40% of Catalans have joined them because of the money and because we are not loved," he says.

Either way, Mas does not plan to scrap toll roads. "I think toll roads will remain," he says. "Europe is heading towards a model of payment for infrastructure by users rather than by the citizens via taxes. It is Spain that is outside this model, not Catalonia."

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