Eduardo Rubiño, the Madrid City Council councilor who was attacked this Friday in the municipal plenary session of the Spanish capital by Vox councilor Javier Ortega Smith, gave several interviews reacting to what happened.
In one of them, broadcast by Cadena SER, the Mas Madrid councilor reported that Ortega Smith, after hitting a folder by throwing a bottle at it, snapped at him: “Now cry.” An expression that, according to Rubiño, “denotes a complexed masculinity of which they make a flag.”
“He says it to me, he wouldn’t say it to anyone else,” reflected the attacked councilor. “Perhaps he considers me a person who is less of a man than him,” he added. “It reminds me of a phrase that class bullies would say to class faggots,” Rubiño concluded.
In another interview, this time on RNE, Rubiño called Vox “thugs in a suit and tie.” At the same time, he warned that “they are not going to intimidate them.” “What we experienced yesterday is so dangerous that it crossed all the red lines, since it represented the act of greatest intimidation and violence that I have experienced in the years that I have been in politics, which I have been in for a few now,” he said.
This Saturday, the municipal group of Más Madrid registered two letters to formally demand the resignation of Ortega Smith and the president of the plenary session, Borja Fanjul. In the first case due to the aggression and in the second due to the reaction, which they consider lukewarm, without defending or protecting the attacked person.
For his part, Ortega Smith already said on Friday that he had no plans to resign. “Let the victim recover from his serious injuries,” said the far-right councilor, Vox spokesperson, in the plenary session. “Probably, as a human being, I should not have thrown the bottle at him, which by the way was empty. There has been no aggression and I regret that some, like the mayor, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, want to row politically and get some kind of profit by saying that this ‘aggression’ is unacceptable,” he continued.