The leader of the ultra-right, Santiago Abascal, made it clear again yesterday that the only red line he has put in the PP in the negotiations to constitute the Bureau of Congress is to “negotiate with a nationalist party”. “They go against our statutes and principles”, remarked the president of Vox yesterday after collecting the minutes of the deputy. However, he also assured that the veto to the Basque nationalists does not prevent the popular ones from negotiating with the PNB so that they have a seat in the governing body of the Congress.
What Abascal wanted to say was that they would not lend their seats for the presidency to be exercised by the PNB, but that it is the same for them to be in an equation with the nationalists if it serves for the right to take control of the Bureau. The PP can leave votes to the two groups so that they are present in the governing body of the Lower House.
For the extreme right, this presence must have the rank of vice president, as it already had in the last legislature with Ignacio Gil Lázaro. And this is precisely what I was negotiating yesterday with Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s party. “Vox is the third political force in Spain and represents three million Spaniards”, defended Abascal, at the same time warning that his party cannot under any circumstances be left out of the Table, as it did happen in the Region of Murcia, where the PP did not give in to the pressures of the ultra-right.
In his return to Congress Abascal announced that the lawyer Pepa Millán (Córdoba, 1995) will be the new spokesperson of the parliamentary group, replacing Iván Espinosa de los Monteros, who last week announced that he was leaving the position “for personal and family reasons”. Party sources insist that the war between families is the reason for his abrupt departure.
Millán came out in the crosshairs to succeed Espinosa de los Monteros, given that the party leadership wanted to promote a female profile as a scourge of the left. With a meteoric rise, Millán has won many followers among the ultras for his interventions in the Senate, where he faced Pedro Sánchez.
