The days after the May 28 elections have brought a bag of surprises. It is interesting to review them.
On Monday the 29th, with all the fish sold, it was learned that there was another detainee for the highly commented case of buying votes by mail in Mojácar (AlmerÃa). This time he was not a socialist militant. He was the gravedigger of the town, accused of rigging votes for the Popular Party. It was not known until Monday. The news fell off the radar of the media while Esteban González Pons and Isabel DÃaz Ayuso injected pressure at the end of the campaign, accusing Pedro Sánchez of orchestrating a massive pot-busting.
On Tuesday 30, the Valencia Court announced the acquittal of the former socialist president of the Valencia Provincial Council, Jorge RodrÃguez, arrested in 2018 on charges of having carried out a series of illegal contracts in the public company Divalterra (formerly Imelsa). . The case included another 13 accused of administrative prevarication, embezzlement of public funds and falsification of an official document. All of them have been acquitted. RodrÃguez’s mother committed suicide three months after the arrest of her son, as he explained after hearing the sentence. The judges waited for the elections to pass to make public the acquittal of the accused.
A week later, on Tuesday, June 6, a police report was released according to which Mónica Oltra, former vice president of the Generalitat Valenciana, did not write or delete any email that could be incriminating in the ongoing judicial investigation into sexual abuse committed by her ex-husband, a social services worker, to a minor who was under the guardianship of the Generalitat. The report, requested by an extreme right-wing entity that appears as a private prosecution, does not close the judicial investigation, which will continue with other proceedings, but weakens the suspicions that Oltra tried to protect her ex-husband. The vice president was the main electoral asset of the CompromÃs coalition until she resigned when she was summoned by the judge to take her statement as being investigated. Headed by Joan BaldovÃ, the Valencian formation has made little mention of Oltra throughout the 28-M campaign (Baldovà did do so to say that he was putting his hand in the fire for his predecessor), losing one hundred thousand votes and his three most precious mayoralties : Valencia, Ontinyent and Alzira. The report, entrusted to a technical group of the provincial brigade of the judicial police of Valencia, was completed two weeks before the regional elections, but the judge decided to wait until June for the partial lifting of the secrecy of the proceedings.
None of these events singled out the 28-M campaign, although an important segment of the electorate (30% according to some analysts) waited until the last few days to decide their vote. It did not decant, but it did influence. The background current was not favorable to the left and they went to vote under a strong media storm that spoke of electoral fraud. The judicial delays may not have decided the final result, but they show us the texture of the moment we live in.
The background music is provided by the Mójácar gravedigger. Luisón, as he is known in town, was seized by the PP in the 2019 municipal elections and is now in jail. Attention, however, to the nuance. Let’s never lose sight of the nuances in extreme times. The gravedigger is in jail because he had another case pending: he sold a stolen saxophone.
