With the pilot program of Castilla y León, where the president, the popular Alfonso Fernández Mañueco, called his vice president, the far-right Juan Gallardo, a “liante”, in progress, PP and Vox sealed new pacts after the regional and municipal elections in May which, at this point, have already shown serious flaws.
The main reason for discord is in the bilingual communities, where Santiago Abascal’s formation tries to impose its unifying vision of Spain, which relegates cultural diversity to the mere expression of folkloric peculiarities and reserves a predominant role for Spanish.
Carlos Mazón was the fastest PP candidate to close a pact with the extreme right to take over the presidency of the Generalitat Valenciana. The biggest obstacle that, until now, it has had to overcome is Vox’s intention to undermine the teaching and public presence of Valencian, questioning, in the most blatant tradition, the linguistic unity with Catalan and the Balearic Islands. The president met with Verònica Cantó, president of the Valencian Academy of Literature (AVL), to make it clear that his Government did not question his academic authority despite the non-normative variants used in the Department of Agriculture, in the hands of the extreme right. , although, yes, he suggested “revalencianizing” the institution.
The president of the Balearic Islands, Marga Prohens, who governs alone thanks to a PP pact with Vox, also maintains an open linguistic front with the extreme right, which pressures from outside the Executive for the possibility of choosing a teaching path mainly in Spanish. be implemented as soon as possible, already next year. But the Balearic Government has asked for time for such a profound change in the educational system, which in practice could lead to school segregation.
It was difficult for María Guardiola to accept, under strong pressure from the national leadership of the PP, that she had to accommodate Vox in her Cabinet if she wanted to preside over Extremadura. Once the toad was swallowed, she wanted to ignore her intake and stated that her relationship with the extreme right was “little or none,” which led Vox to demand “respect” in an attempt to crisis. The first counselor of Forest Management and Rural World, the area that manages the extreme right, officially resigned for “personal reasons,” although her resignation was attributed to discrepancies with the Vox management in Madrid. The new owner has been sanctioned several times for failing to comply with the Hunting law. A wolf guarding the sheep.
Jorge Azcón’s Government in Aragon, which took longer to come together than Guardiola’s, has benefited from its slow cooking and also, as in the case of Extremadura, from the fact that the community, in which Catalan and Aragonese are spoken as well as Castilian, has greater cultural homogeneity, which facilitates relations with the Spanish ultranationalism of Vox. All in all, the Aragonese president was faced with having to publicly support two general directors, members of Abascal’s party, who were caught online praising Franco’s regime. When the time comes to talk about the Ebro transfer, the differences with Vox, which wants to take water “to every corner of the country,” may be louder.
He was on the verge of going to a repeat election to be able to govern without ties, but the far-right has not yet given Fernando López Miras, who just a month ago was the last popular regional president to take office thanks to a forced agreement with Vox. Headaches. In Murcia there is also no linguistic diversity that provokes Spanish nationalism in its most centralist version, so conflicts are not foreseen on that side. A different matter is immigration, which has been linked to terrorism by the leader of Vox in the region, José Ángel Antelo, vice president and advisor of Security, Emergencies and Territorial Organization. The “jihadist infiltration” in the boats that arrive in Murcia “increases the risk of attacks,” says Antelo, which has already led the PSOE to request his dismissal.
Aside from the regional pacts, PP and Vox have closed agreements in numerous town councils in which the extreme right has unleashed a wave of cultural cancellations of films and plays that has already caused cracks in municipalities of Cantabria, Madrid, Andalusia and Castilla and Lion.
In cities like Valladolid, this alliance has served to unseat the most voted force, which is why, as former Valladolid mayor Óscar Puente reminded Alberto Núñez Feijóo, “from winner to winner,” during his failed investiture debate, the thesis of the president of the PP that the winning list should govern has been hopelessly destroyed.
If in those councils in which it was necessary to reach an agreement to win the mayor’s office the agreement fell under its own weight, in others, such as in Valencia, it has been more difficult. The popular María José Catalá has resisted letting Vox into her government after obtaining the leadership. But with 13 of the 33 councilors she has had no choice but to give in to the evidence and grant the extreme right the second term of mayor to ensure the approval of the municipal budgets.
Gijón deserves a separate chapter, where the mayor, Carmen Moriyón, broke the tripartite pact between Foro Asturias, her political formation, PP and Vox by expelling the two far-rightists from her government team shortly after the first hundred days of office were completed. . Vox, which wanted to give an award based on its values ??at the city’s film festival, “put its acronym before the general interest,” she argued.
