More than two months have passed since the polls in Aragon granted a comfortable absolute majority to the Popular Party with the addition of Vox. However, the negotiations for the investiture of Jorge Azcón as regional president, cooked over a slow fire and under monastic secrecy, are still open today. With no date set on the calendar for the inauguration, the ultra-right is pressing the popular ones in recent days to reach an agreement before August 23, the deadline to avoid an electoral repetition that neither of them is interested in.
Azcón has always maintained, actively and passively, that his objective is to govern alone, a desire that clashes with the devilish regional parliamentary arithmetic that the elections produced. At the outset, the popular has 28 seats, the same as the sum of the left bloc (PSOE, Chunta, Podemos and IU), so in the first vote it would need the seven Vox deputies to achieve an absolute majority.
If this does not happen, in the second round it would be worth adding the support of the only deputy from the Aragonese Party (PAR) and the abstention of Vox and the three parliamentarians that Teruel Existe (TE) has. The two regional formations have been favorable under certain conditions, such as a programmatic agreement that rejects the transfer of the Ebro (PAR) or that Vox does not appear in the Executive (TE). However, the extreme right publicly insists on asserting their votes: they will not abstain and will vote against the investiture if they are not part of the autonomous Executive.
The negotiations, the most opaque that are remembered in these lands, have gone through difficult moments, although without reaching the level of Murcia or Extremadura. One of the most tense took place at the end of June, when the PP, in a failed attempt to replicate the Balearic model (programmatic agreement and presence in island councils in exchange for governing alone), handed over the Presidency of the Cortes to Vox , who chose the controversial denialist Marta Fernández for the position.
Now, it is the scuffles of the respective domes in Madrid after the generals that delay the process with two weeks to go until the Cortes Generales are constituted and the members of the Congressional Table are elected, where Vox aspires to renew the position that held the last legislature.
In this sense, Vox’s Deputy Secretary for Political Action, Jorge Buxadé, asked the PP on Monday to come out of its “bewilderment” after 23-J and stop using Murcia and Aragon as “bargaining currency” for other possible pacts . Vox “has not moved from its initial position,” he said, and continues “with an outstretched hand” to agree with the PP “useful and safe governments to take immediate action.”
Also from Zaragoza, the deputy spokesman for the ultras in the regional courts, Santiago Morón, yesterday urged Azcón to close a programmatic agreement as soon as possible without renouncing that his formation enters the Government, with Valencia as a model. “We also wouldn’t want it to be the last day, hurry and run,” he said. From the popular headquarters, silence.
Meanwhile, the local opposition makes Azcón ugly for the lack of “transparency and clarity” in the negotiations and Madrid’s interference in a local process that is now part of the game being played at the national level. “I am concerned that the dates advance and that it is decisions emanating from Madrid that are preventing the formation of a Government. We Aragonese have learned that we do well when we do not accept interference from Madrid”, criticized the still acting president, Javier Lambán. In less than three weeks it will be known whether or not there is an agreement.
