Vox implodes in the Balearic Islands. The national secretary of the party, Ignacio Garriga, announced yesterday the proposal to expel five of its seven deputies in the Balearic Parliament after a riot caused by the critical sector of training, which has a majority in the Autonomous Chamber. The rioters had just announced yesterday, by surprise, the immediate expulsion from the parliamentary group of the president of Vox in the islands, Patricia de las Heras, and of the current president of the Parliament, Gabriel Le Senne, in a defiance in all rule to the authority of Santiago Abascal.
The expulsion of Le Senne also opens a serious institutional crisis, since he will be automatically relieved of his position at the head of the Chamber. The regulations of the Balearic Parliament establish that the expulsion of a deputy from his group means the automatic termination of his institutional positions. This implies that Le Senne will be dismissed tomorrow officially when the Bureau of Parliament communicates the request for expulsion that has been made by the critical sector of the party.
The Balearic Parliament is now in a complicated situation because the five rebel deputies expelled from Vox remain in control of the parliamentary group and with the economic income paid by the Chamber, while the two deputies who remain loyal to Abascal and militate in Vox will pass to be non-affiliated deputies without their own funds and with few possibilities to intervene and present proposals.
Vox’s internal crisis will also have effects on the governance of the Balearic Islands, since the president, Marga Prohens, depends on the ultra party to have a majority in the Chamber. The PP won 25 deputies in the last regional elections, which leaves the Popular Party five seats short of an absolute majority. Therefore, Prohens is linked in this legislature to the five rebel parliamentarians to be able to govern and push forward the proposals in Parliament such as, for example, the budgets.
The PP has not yet revealed whether the president will continue to seek the support of critics to govern or whether she will break with them and maintain her pact with the official Vox sector. The Balearic president tried to minimize the effects of this crisis yesterday and confined it to the parliamentary sphere. Prohens asked for responsibility, assured that it is an internal crisis of Santiago Abascal’s party that will only have consequences in Parliament and not in the Government, and insisted that the PP will continue to govern as it has been until now.
Vox’s serious crisis has been brewing for months, with a constant clash between the leadership of the party in the islands and the members of the parliamentary group. These divisions made it easier for the Balearic Islands to be the only community where the PP was able to form a government alone, without the presence of ultra party representatives in the Prohens team. The national leadership distrusted the intentions of the deputies and avoided giving them more power with portfolios to the Balearic Government.
This veto to enter the Executive of Prohens has been deteriorating the relations between the parliamentary group and the party during all these months and the first challenge was seen last October, when the deputies refused to support the ceiling of expenditure of the budgets for the coming year, despite the indications of the national management to the contrary. That first crisis already forced the departure of one of the Vox deputies from the parliamentary group, who went on to become a member.
Ignacio Garriga called the deputies to order, but the differences and mistrust between the national leadership and the regional deputies have been increasing. The general secretary made a visit to the islands a few days ago in which he did not meet with the parliamentary group, although he did meet with the municipal group in Palma.
The last disagreement had to do with discrepancies in linguistic matters. Vox has been very firm during all these months to demand from Prohens a gradual replacement of Catalan with Spanish and has managed to get the Balearic Islands to implement the choice of language in the classrooms from next year, but the representatives of the formation did not support to the proposal to create a Spanish Defense Office, one of Abascal’s demands that was included in the programmatic agreement.
Last week, the national leadership asked the representatives in the islands to issue a statement against Prohens’ tepid language, but the deputies refused and the statement was signed by the president of the party. None of the rebel deputies went to the Vox assembly last weekend where Santiago Abascal was confirmed as president of the formation.
