The name of the independent candidate proposed by Vox in the second motion of no confidence in this legislature, Ramón Tamames, has allowed the PNV to compare the 89-year-old professor and economist with a Cepsa company butan tanker. The Tamames ship, during its years in service, sank another vessel, spotted UFOs in the Mediterranean and ended its days in a dilapidated scrapyard in Mexico.
“The butan tanker Tamames collided in the year 77 in the Thames with the German merchant Eva Witte and sent it to the bottom. You already have four wrecks per hit, the Communist Party of Spain, the Progressive Federation, the United Left and CDS, I don’t know if it is in the fifth with Vox”, has compared the spokesman for the Basque nationalists, Aitor Esteban, from the lectern of the Lower House, who has drawn several parallels between the trajectory of Tamames and the butaner ship.
“The color of the helmet when it began its voyage was red, it changed color and ended its days painted black, a smudge black like the black shirts of the Italian fascist friends of those who present it here today. It has gone from red to black and This is how it will end”, Esteban pointed out in relation to the career of Tamames, who began his political career in opposition to Francoism and joined the PCE together with Santiago Carrillo.
“The Tamames ship came to an end in a dilapidated and forgotten scrapyard in Veracruz, in Mexico,” Esteban stressed to the economist, who has evaded responding to small groups in Congress. “You think that she is the vedette, but she is a simple Vox showgirl who does not know how to dance to the beat,” he directed the candidate.
In his speech, Esteban has been harsh with Tamames and has reproached him for using “fallacies” for talking about the overrepresentation of the Catalan, Galician and Basque nationalist parties. “It is not academic to affirm without relying on data,” the deputy snapped, who just after explained that the seat that the PNV obtained in the Lower House with the fewest votes required 40,000 ballots. It is about Álava. Instead, he has detailed, Vox obtained six deputies in 2019 with fewer votes than the cheapest in the PNV. One in Ceuta with 11,000 ballots, another in Segovia with 14,000, one in Zamora and another in Ávila with 17,000, and in Salamanca with 34,000 and in Cáceres with 35,000 votes. “Vox got six seats with fewer votes than the PNV,” the jeltzale spokesman remarked.
“Those who have the fewest votes per seat are the PSOE and PP, less propaganda and more academia. We are here because the people support us, not because of the legislator’s magnanimous decision,” said Esteban, who has branded Tamames a “fickle figure,” ” partisan weather vane” and has made his episode of turncoat in Madrid ugly with a motion of censure from the right that he supported against the criteria of his formation.
Regarding Tamames’ changes in criteria, Esteban asked the candidate if what he says today he will continue to think tomorrow. “He has gone from believing in the Catalan nation to seeing that idea as a threat,” said the PNV deputy, who pointed out that there is an “intolerant mood” in part of the candidate’s speech in a motion that he described as “illegitimate even if it’s legal. “It is an initiative that seeks to undermine the institutions,” lamented Esteban, who has reproached Tamames for “not even” he believing that he is a candidate for the presidency of the Government.
Likewise, the jeltzale has warned the candidate proposed by Vox that “the signatories of his supposed candidacy have used him”, although he may believe that it has been the other way around, and that “the day after tomorrow nobody will remember” him. “They, neither”, he has added in reference to Vox. “Remember what I tell you,” Esteban concluded.
Before Esteban, the spokesperson for EH Bildu, Mertxe Aizpurua, took the floor in the chamber, criticizing the economist for “the historic mistake of becoming the defender and spokesperson for the extreme right”. “We regret that his trip has ended like this,” she said in her speech.
In addition, Aizpurua has felt that Tamames has opted for the path of “reducing fundamental rights and freedoms, that of hatred and the exclusion of the different, that of authoritarianism and imposition”, something that he does not know if the economist does “out of simple vanity or because they have been “cheated”.
