Toni Pérez will not be the first mayor of Benidorm to preside over the Provincial Council of Alicante, as he himself took care to recall in his first speech, in which he alternated, as in his oath, Valencian with Castilian. But it will be the first to do so in a democracy, because the previous one, in 1966, was Pedro Zaragoza, considered the “father” of modern Benidorm, perhaps the only recognized Francoist whose career is openly -and frequently praised- in the local political world.
Toni Pérez will be able to govern the Provincial Council with more freedom of action than his predecessor, the current president of the Generalitat, Carlos Mazón, since he has an absolute majority that the man from Alicante did not have, although his rapport with the Ciudadanos deputies who gave him their support was so impeccable that they ended up going over to his land.
Pérez has the absolute majority offered by the 16 seats of the PP in a chamber with 31 provincial deputies. The 13 of the PSOE voted for their candidate, the mayor of Alfàs del Pi, Vicente Arques; and that of Compromís, Joaquín Perles, mayor of Calp, and the first provincial deputy of Vox, Gema Alemán, councilor of Sant Joan, voted for themselves.
The mayor of Benidorm becomes the ninth president of the Democracy Provincial Council, the sixth consecutive of the PP. Some of his predecessors, such as César Sánchez, Julio de España or Antonio Mira Perceval, in addition to Mazón himself, attended the constitutive session of the provincial corporation and election of the Presidency along with some 450 guests. In addition to the new members of the Council, the president of the Valencia Provincial Council, Vicente Mompó, the sub-delegate of the Government, Carlos Sánchez Heras, national and regional deputies and senators also accompanied the new deputies.
Numerous mayors of the province, such as Alicante, Luis Barcala, Elx, Pablo Ruz, Alcoi, Toni Francés, or Torrevieja, Eduardo Dolón, also attended the plenary session, in which the economic and business sector was represented, among others, by the president and the general secretary of the CEV, Salvador Navarro and Esther Guilabert, its president in Alicante, Joaquín Pérez, the president of Hosbec, Fede Fuster, the president of INECA, Nacho Amirola , or the president of the Chamber of Commerce, Carlos Baño. The rectors of the UA and the UMH, Amparo Navarro and Juan José Ruíz Martínez, respectively, also attended.
In his speech, after praising the management of his predecessor in a mandate marked by the devastating DANA that affected Vega Baja, the pandemic and the fires last year, Pérez was satisfied to be able to work, from now on, “side by side” with the Generalitat to fight jointly for the arrival of water, to boost tourism or for the arrival of infrastructure in Alicante.
The new president assured that he will try “to achieve better financing for the province and knock on the door of the Government of Spain, whoever occupies it”, while explaining that “water is a necessity and it cannot be understood that due to a matter of ideology or sectarianism, not for technical reasons, it did not get where it is needed”.
In statements to journalists, he insisted that showing his “back” is a bad political principle to exercise dialogue and asked that politicians practice “active listening”, while highlighting his harmony with Mazón: “The alignment of the Alicante Provincial Council with a Government of the Generalitat with an Alicante president is more than evident”.
“There is a Council in which Mazón is already showing his imprint with facts and the first decision, keeping his word, is a reduction in a tax of those that as citizens we normally do not understand,” Pérez said.
He asked the mayors of the 141 municipalities of the province “to be vindictive. We owe ourselves as elected to our fellow citizens and neighbors; the Provincial Council owes itself to all of them for the mere fact of being and feeling Alicante”. And he showed his concern for the fact that “depopulation continues to be a very serious problem in the interior of the province, and aging and the lack of socioeconomic resources continue to affect many localities.”
For this reason, he promised to launch a new Close plan and that the institution’s set of plans have a special orientation towards the 51 municipalities with less than 1,000 inhabitants “that make up an inland paradise on the greatest terreta del món”.
Lastly, he insisted that two of his main lines of action will be water and tourism: “Alicante is a land deficient in water, where with investment the comprehensive water management system has been achieved, which is not that it is very productive, but that it amazes the world for its performance capacity”, he stated after expressing his willingness to continue defending the arrival of transferred water from the Tagus.
