“Ciudadanos is going to work so that the failed policies of the PSOE and PP are left behind and Spain gets on the train of progress. We will be the voice of families, the middle classes and young people.” With this regenerationist spirit, the first general council of the liberal party began this morning in Granada after the refoundation that took place in Madrid at the general assembly in January.
With the Alhambra on the horizon and accompanied by the candidate for the mayoralty of Granada, Concha Insúa, and the coordinator in Andalusia, Andrés Reche, the spokesperson of the party, Patricia Guasp has shown herself proud to lead the party that in the 21st century claims the Spanish liberal tradition and has evoked the heroic struggle of Mariana Pineda from Granada for freedom and against nineteenth-century absolutism.
Executed in 1831, during the reign of Fernando VII, Pineda stood out for his determined support for the liberals, led at the time by General José María de Torrijos, who in turn was also shot in Malaga, along with his 48 companions and without previous trial, at the end of the same year, accused of conspiring against the absolutist government after a pronouncement in Gibraltar.
“On May 26, 1831, the young Doña Mariana Pineda was sacrificed in this place destined for the torture of criminals because she longed for the freedom of her homeland. The Constitutional City Council and the Territorial Court ordered in 1840 that in memory of such an illustrious victim in this place the Sacred Sign of our Holy Religion and that no executions of justice be carried out in it again”, reads the monument in his memory located in the Plaza de la Libertad in Granada.
Having made this historical note, Balearic politics has presented the project of the “new Citizens” -a formula with which he often refers to his party, to mark distances with the previous stage- as the only one that truly aspires to “reform” a Spain which is currently “broken” and “suffocated”, from his point of view, not only by populism, but also by the “bipartisanship” of the last 40 years.
In this sense, Guasp considers that both the PP and the PSOE are “conservative” forces, since they intend to maintain the status quo and “preserve everything that does not work” in Spain, as, in his opinion, is observed in the reform of pensions, which Ciudadanos consider unsustainable, in the fees paid by the self-employed or in the maintenance of a “subsidized economy”, in which the two majority parties act as a “placement office for their own”.
Faced with this situation, the Liberal spokeswoman stressed that “transformation begins in the municipalities”, which is why on May 28 Ciudadanos will stand for election with a very flexible framework program, the one approved today in Granada, which then the candidates will modulate in each territory based on the “real problems” of the population.
Regarding the situation of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ), Guasp considers it “indecency” for the Government of Pedro Sánchez to continue to be blocked and for this reason the member Concepción Sáez has resigned and the entire progressive sector is considering resigning en bloc. The spokesperson for Ciudadanos has reiterated that both the PP and the PSOE “use” justice and that her party has been “many years” denouncing this “politicization”.
“We believe that there should be neither distribution nor marketing of judges in Spain,” added Guasp, who has announced that the Secretary General of Ciudadanos, MEP Adrián Vázquez, will meet with the Commissioner for Justice of the European Commission, Didier Reynders, to denounce the “multiple outrages” of Sánchez in the institutions.
In her denunciation of a true lack of separation of powers in Spain, the liberal spokeswoman has also charged against the main opposition party and has wondered if the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, can be worthy of the confidence of the Spanish , since “it also participates in this distribution of State powers”, something that has been illustrated with the recent agreements on the composition of the Court of Auditors and the appointment of directors in RTVE.
