One week before the elections in Castilla y León, Vox shifts its strategy to expressly blame the national leadership of the PP for María Guardiola’s fiasco in Extremadura. This Friday, the extreme right united its votes with the left and overthrew the candidate’s second investiture attempt. Santiago Abascal, who had asked for his head, now praises his negotiating “effort” while pointing out the interference of Genoa, which accuses him of seeking a smokescreen for its internal problems.
The first to shoot was Abascal last Friday during one of his many electoral events in Castilla y León where, as already happened in Extremadura and Aragon, the candidate becomes irrelevant in the presence of the maximum leader. He assured that Vox is “open” to negotiating and said that Guardiola “is making an effort to get closer and accept the electoral reality.”
Abascal’s words are surprising if one takes into account that during the electoral campaign last December he renamed the PP candidate “Irene Guardiola”, in reference to Irene Montero, for her supposed radical feminism, and put on the table that he would ask for her resignation to reach an agreement.
Guardiola’s communicative swings and the possibility that a blockage in the negotiation could affect the immediately following campaigns, led to the direct intervention of the national leadership. Alberto Núñez Feijóo ordered silence and put his ‘number two’, Miguel Tellado, in charge of the negotiation. According to ‘Article 14’, the PP asked Vox not to negotiate with Guardiola or his team.
The consequence of this intervention by Tellado has been doubly negative: neither investiture in Extremadura nor agreement for the Presidency of the Cortes of Aragon. Although the difference in treatment towards Guardiola and towards the president of Aragon, Jorge Azcón, is notable, it has been impossible to separate what was happening in both regions.
In both communities the clock for the electoral repetition has already started. Two months that, according to Abascal, are more than enough. “They think that under pressure we are going to end up giving in, but we do not negotiate with haste, pressure, blackmail, or dirty war,” he said on Friday in statements to the media.
The agreement is “perfectly possible,” he assured, where until recently the distance was presented as insurmountable. In his second investiture speech, Guardiola demanded an abstention from any of the groups in the Assembly. “I am not asking anyone to give up their program or to applaud what they do not share,” he said. The national leader of Vox did not rule out claiming the Presidencies of the regional parliaments as part of the negotiation. “It is perfectly feasible from a legal point of view,” he recalled.
Late on Friday, Feijóo attacked Vox’s strategy of stretching the calendar: “In Extremadura, voting was done before Christmas. How do we tell a man who lives in Mérida that there will be no government until the Castilla y León elections are held? Is that respect for the voters?” he questioned. And he warned that after the blockade of Extremadura due to the elections in Castilla y León, Abascal “will be willing to block the elections in Castilla y León due to those in Andalusia.”
Go for Manueco
Vox’s tactical objective is no longer Guardiola. And he keeps his relationship with Azcón safe. The ultra party is focused on the March 15 elections in Castilla y León, and has put its bow on the PP candidate for re-election, Alfonso Fernández Mañueco. And to replicate the criticism of the PP for overthrowing María Guardiola’s investiture, Vox has accused the PP of being “determined to construct a story that blames Vox for the lack of agreement.” According to Abascal, the PP does not make an effort “to dialogue to achieve an investiture.”
The answer came from Miguel Tellado, who revealed on Friday that Vox spent seven days “not wanting to sit down to negotiate” with them. “They are very focused on the internal purges of their own party. A question of priorities,” he noted.
Tellado was thus referring to the internal crisis that has been open in Vox for months and that has led the Abascal leadership to expel one of the founders from the party, the —at the moment— spokesperson for the Madrid City Council, Javier Ortega Smith.
The purge of Ortega Smith is one of the causes of the fall of the until now leader of Vox in Murcia, José Ángel Antelo. The former vice president of Murcia has assured that he will take his own party to court for allegedly using his own digital signature without his knowledge to remove the party’s spokesperson in the regional Assembly.
The string of political corpses now includes such relevant former leaders as Iván Espinosa de los Monteros or Rocío Monasterio, among many others. Both, in addition to the party’s former first leader, Alejo Vidal-Quadras, ostentatiously attended an 8M event organized by the PP in Congress last week. Others who had responsibilities at Vox in the past, such as Víctor Sánchez del Real, point the finger directly at Abascal’s main advisor, Kiko Méndez Monasterio, for the purges. His own sister, representative Lourdes Méndez Monasterio, appeared this week in some audios criticizing him.
Tellado attacked Vox on social networks: “After voting with the PSOE and Podemos against the investiture of María Guardiola, Abascal will now go to Castilla y León to ask center-right citizens to vote to also block this community.” Also from the official PP account they accused Vox of not fulfilling its promise of “wanting to put an end to ‘Sanchism’.”
Unlike what happened in Extremadura and Aragon, the electoral campaign in Castilla y León has disappeared from the media radar due to the illegal attacks by the US and Israel against Iran and the consequences they are having around the world.
But Abascal also sought direct confrontation with Mañueco, who in an electoral debate accused Vox of wanting to “throw human beings into the sea,” in reference to migrants who arrive by boat to the Spanish coast. He was alluding to Vox’s request to mobilize the Navy to block the arrival of boats to Spain and which has already been replicated at the time by its highest military command.
Abascal called Mañueco’s words “indecent” and asked him to rectify them. And he blamed the PP and the PSOE for having “a real responsibility for the people who die at sea, because they are the ones who have promoted migration policies for decades in Brussels.”
The last week of the campaign will also be the one with the greatest presence of Feijóo. The leader of the PP closed a rally in La Bañeza (León) on Friday. On Sunday he was in Tordesillas (Valladolid). And in the coming days he will participate in events in Riaza (Segovia) and in El Burgo de Osma (Soria), among others.
The polls predict on Sunday a result similar to that of Extremadura and Aragón: an insufficient victory for the PP and a rebound for Vox. The negotiations will thus be threefold. And on the horizon looms the last electoral event of this cycle, Andalusia, where the PP is playing for Juan Manuel Moreno’s absolute majority. Little joke.
Source: www.eldiario.es
