Macarena Olona has been settling scores with Vox since she broke up with the formation in July of last year. The former spokeswoman in Congress has marked distances on an ideological -and also emotional- level with the leadership led by Santiago Abascal and of which she was a part, and now she opens a new front by openly questioning the party’s finances. Among other issues, Olona calls for “transparency” about the destination of “the 4.5 million euro grant” that Vox transferred in 2021 to his Disenso foundation, created a year earlier. As she has revealed this Sunday in the program Lo de Évole, on laSexta, just over half of that donation, 2.5 million, would have been made secretly.
Olona has detailed that in the Vox general assembly held in April last year, a “direct subsidy” from the party to his foundation was reported, in 2021, of 2 million euros, but in the foundation’s accounts for that same year 2021, which have just been published, there is also another grant of 2.5 million euros made in February, which was not discussed in the aforementioned assembly, nor does it appear, according to Olona, ??in Vox’s audited accounts for that year.
“What would I do if I were still in Vox, and I was a militant, a leader? I would require that in addition to the audited annual accounts that have been submitted, they present model 347 of the Tax Agency, which is the statement that allows you to find out what is hidden within the heading ‘Other expenses and external services’, that is, the payments that you do to supposedly independent professionals, for an amount greater than 3,000 euros, and that in the private sphere we call ‘the whores and miscellaneous account’. That is where the evils are usually hidden ”, Olona assured.
The former leader of Vox did not want to go any further and, when the journalist Jordi Évole asked her “if you have any indication of where those 4.5 million euros of public money that Vox has placed in the Disenso Foundation have gone?” He has limited himself to saying: “What I have are the right questions. Are you willing to present model 347, for an exercise in transparency? And she has assured that the first time she learned of the Disenso accounts, Vox’s think tank or laboratory of ideas, was at that party assembly in April last year.
Throughout the interview, which has been broadcast in two consecutive installments of 50 minutes each, Olona makes an exhaustive review of the various fronts that he has open with his old formation. “The Vox of March 2019 (when she joined) is not the one of today, neither at the ideological level nor at the company level,” she said, and has assured that “in some cases” the party’s decisions are made from outside .
“The higher up I got, the more fog I saw around me, and it wasn’t clear to me who made the decisions within Vox. It is evident that, for me, Santi is not completely free ”, he pointed out, regarding the party leader, Santiago Abascal. “When I tell you outside of Vox it is because of people who are not part of the organizational chart, but who have significant decision-making power,” he added.
In parallel, it has left open the possibility of returning to active politics. He has assured that he has “had offers to finance candidacies in these regional elections” on May 28, and has ruled them out “out of a sense of State”, so as “not to fragment the political board”. And although she was born in Alicante, she has said that she will do politics from Granada, the province in which she registered her when Vox, against her will, sent her as a candidate for the Andalusian Parliament, in June of last year. Olona did not obtain the expected results and although she managed to take possession of the seat, on July 31 she announced that she was leaving Vox and leaving politics. “I left because it was clear to me that they were going to turn off my voice, there comes a time when I become an obstacle to the current drift of Vox,” she assured this Sunday.
In the conversation with Évole, Olona has insisted on the “fierce attack campaign” that he has suffered from his former party since he left, an offensive that he refers to as “the meat grinding machine” and assures that “it responds to fear”. “They’re coming for me,” he said. “That they are meeting with journalists, with relevant people, to say that I am crazy, that I have mental health problems, is very unfair. Not only because it is an absolute lie, but because I have given everything for that project… They need to destroy me”, he stressed. “It’s all an apparatus against you,” he notes.
In this context, she has located “the dissemination of a false sex video” about her “and some direct threats” on social networks, against which she has filed a complaint. “In this criminal process, it will have to be verified if the information published by the media saying that the person behind these actions is Ignacio Garriga’s right-hand man in the Catalan Parliament and hired by Vox,” he pointed out, referring to Twitter account Españabola.
Españabola’s Telegram account is even more explicit and is full of images of Franco and Hitler, as well as various Nazi symbology. “It is emetic”, stressed Olona, ??who has wondered if it could be classified as “a mafioso who, when a person leaves the party, applies a policy of either you are with me or you are against me” and “then we mark you as an enemy to be brought down” . However, he is not intimidated: “If someone at Vox has the impression that you cannot leave the party of the alpha male without asking for permission or authorization, they have been deeply mistaken with me, they have been fucking wrong,” he pointed out.
Even on Vox’s finances, Olona recalled that two deputies in Murcia, after being expelled from the party, denounced and “won before the courts of justice because it was proven that they acted in accordance with the law when they refused to allow the party to intervene in the accounts of the parliamentary group”, in order “to be able to have the hiring of advisers and the accounts of the subsidies”. “Eliminating the decision-making power of those who have a formal signature on the accounts of parliamentary groups is illegal,” she recalled, noting that she refused this maneuver in the Andalusian Parliament: “With me, an audit of accounts, becoming the figurehead , No”.
In this sense, and asked about the lack of internal democracy in Vox, she has not ruled out that “with the law in hand” it could be “activating the process of illegalization of that formation for breach of a constitutional mandate”, but she has assured that You cannot “put the Vox project at risk, fertilizing that land.” “Who am I to destroy the hope of thousands of Spaniards?”, She has expressed herself.
He has also ensured that the leader of Vox in Castilla y León and vice president of the regional government, Juan García-Gallardo, “is completely intervened” by the leadership led by Santiago Abascal. In this regard, he has cited the “controversial measure” of forcing women who are going to abort to listen to the fetal heartbeat, which is “an exact replica of a measure taken in Hungary.” And he has assured that in a meeting in which she participated “a management person commented that she tried to ensure that there were no women on her team so as not to fall into temptation.” She has explained that she thought “you are an asshole”, but began to “worry” when she saw that the “first time” that Vox has been able to form a government, in Castilla y León, and all the positions are men.
Regarding homophobia in Vox, she has assured that “there is a current of Vox, or rather families, who of course consider that homosexuality is a disease and that homosexual people are deviant people”, from which she strongly distances herself. Regarding xenophobia, she has indicated that she puts forward “the need to defend our borders”, but “at times there have been excesses”. “I have always maintained that in certain discourses, one is that of illegal immigration, another is that of gender violence, we could not go with a broad brush,” she said.
She has also revealed that the Vox leadership called her attention after she vehemently defended herself before a journalist who was not from the extreme right. “They called me to tell me not to confront her like that again because she had been lucky,” since someone “better informed” than that journalist could remind her of Vox’s alliances in the European Parliament with groups of that ideology.
In her time as deputy spokesperson in Congress, Olona was measured in government control sessions with different ministers. In recent comments on Twitter, the former leader of Vox has praised the second vice president and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, assuring that the debate with her was “always high”, although the newspaper library would question that statement. In the interview with Évole, she has assured, along these lines: “She is the only one with whom I have had a face-to-face with whom I have not been able to break up, and she sees that I have entered her …”.
Almost two hours of interview cover many topics, and Olona also makes some singular statements, for example when he assures that Julio Anguita is one of his “great political references.” Or, speaking of the Historical Memory Law, while maintaining that the Government intended to “win with a law what they lost on the battlefield”, as it said when it was approved in 2020, it has also defended the opening of mass graves: “It is essential that anyone who has a relative, whose mortal remains are lost or in ditches, have not been found, everyone, without ideology, without political bias, be given all the necessary help so that these graves can be dug and bury them.” But it has been difficult for him to admit, although in the end he verbalizes it, that Franco “of course” carried out a coup.
At the end of the conversation, Olona explained that her mother raised her alone and that her family was her and her sister. And she has made a confession about her father, who she has explained that she withdrew from her family when she was 13 years old. “My father passed away in March of last year and he had an addiction to drugs and alcohol and he had the enormous dignity to leave home so as not to drag us into the immense pain and terrifying spiral that this disease leads to,” he said. explained.
Asked by Évole, he has detailed that he was addicted to cocaine. He has also revealed that his father, who was Catalan, “had a very nationalist feeling”, and apparently was a pro-independence supporter, according to what the owner of a restaurant told him on one of his trips to Panama, who said he knew him well. This is how she explained it, pointing out that she never asked her father if he had voted for Vox, although he did tell her that he was “very proud” of her career in the party. “I know that in some aspects I was in the antipodes of Vox, because my father had a very nationalist feeling,” she assured.
