Waiting for thelottery trainsThis Monday, a day on which some optimistic hopes are pinned for the recovery of the so-called commuter rail service, we read that the State has reduced its public works contracts in Catalonia for three consecutive years, according to a report by the Chamber of Public Works Contractors of our country. In other words, the State budgets little and executes even less: as you may recall, the Renfe and Adif projects in Catalonia for the last three years (2021, 2022, 2023) are not well documented. They have been 19%, 34% and 43%, respectivelyThen it's all apologies to the users, requests for patience, and promises that things will be fine now, but even with two socialist governments, in Catalonia and in Spain, the treatment is the same as always, not even Balthazar's method of praying to the Moreneta during the 2008 drought could fix that.
This week has also brought us further proof of Sánchez's ability to shift the narrative with the announcement of the regularization of half a million undocumented immigrants. Regularizing the status of people has immense humanitarian importance, and precisely for that reason, it carries the great responsibility of providing public services to hundreds of thousands more citizens with full rights who, precisely because of their poverty, depend heavily on public funds. We're talking about far more train services than we are about, and even less about housing, while services like healthcare and education are stretched to their limits. Catalonia was already underfunded before the population increase of the last 25 years. For reasons of fairness, for Spain's interest in not completely strangling the Catalan "golden goose" that pays but doesn't receive, and to avoid rolling out the red carpet for the far right, it is better for the Government to increase its demands on Sánchez. At least as much as the State's neglect is demanding on the daily lives of Catalans.
