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The Spanish government will this Friday propose presenting an appeal to the Constitutional Court against the bill passed by the Catalan Parliament last week censuring the king Felipe VI and calling for the abolition of the monarchy.

The announcement was made this Tuesday in the Spanish Congress by the deputy prime minister, Carmen Calvo. She said that "the parliament of an autonomous community cannot try to outline the type of state of this country".

"That makes no sense from the legal point of view, but does have to have a political response," she said.

The Catalan president, Quim Torra, responded quickly to the news via Twitter: "it's remarkable logic", he wrote, "as you want a political response you take it to a court. And that way with everything, basically".

Support for the budget

The Spanish executive announced last Thursday that it was studying "the legal measures at its disposal to always prevent those actions which undermine the constitutional position of each and every one of the state's institutions". That came within hours of the vote in the Parliament, when the motion passed with the votes in favour of Junts per Catalunya, Esquerra Republicana and Catalunya En Comú-Podem and the abstention of CUP.

Despite the appeal, the deputy prime minister expressed conviction that pro-independence parties will support the Spanish budget with no gesture in exchange. "We've got a Catalan government which is what the law can allow, we've got commissions running which haven't met for 11 years and almost every week there's a minister in Catalonia", she said, because "we're making natural what had been cleared out before".