After roundly denying, from the cabinet itself, that 4.5 billion euros could be liquidated to Spain's autonomous communities (of which Catalonia is claiming 1.317 billion via the courts) because it was an acting government, treasury minister María Jesús Montero couldn't have been quicker to carry out her first act of the pre-campaign and, miracles of life, it seems that, with a different argument to the previous one, they are going to pay what they owe.
This part of the money which isn't Spain's will be welcomed in Catalonia, since there is more, to do with the chronic deficit in Catalan funding, they're not even thinking of tackling. Similarly, they haven't done anything to correct the scandalous levels of fulfillment of public works investment set out in the state's budgets and which in 2018, the latest financial year to have ended, were at 66% in Catalonia and 114% in the Community of Madrid.
The Spanish government now says it will release the 4.5 billion with the same certainty that just days ago they said it was impossible. Also with the same certainty that they said this is was the advice from a legal report from the state's solicitors; a report that was later said not to exist before, at the last moment, it ended up appearing. Whilst all this is happening, one can only think that someone is convinced that any fib is fine if told from a position of power.
And perhaps Pedro Sánchez is even right in light of how people react every time the cabinet is used like the scam artist on the Rambla moving the little ball in the three-shell game. On day he even confesses on television and tells us he wouldn't sleep if there were any ministers from Podemos in the government, and whilst we debate the same old phrase and people remain distracted, he prepares a future agreement with Ciudadanos. Politics is ever more estranged from the truth: they say one thing and do another.