Vox implodes in the Balearic Islands. The national secretary of the party, Ignacio Garriga, announced yesterday the proposal to expel five of its seven deputies in the Balearic Parliament after a mutiny caused by the critical sector of the party, which has a majority in the regional chamber. The mutineers had announced yesterday, by surprise, the immediate expulsion from the parliamentary group of the president of Vox in the islands, Patricia de las Heras, and the current president of the Parliament, Gabriel Le Senne, a full-fledged challenge to the authority of Santiago Abascal.
The expulsion of Le Senne also opens a serious institutional crisis, since he will be automatically relieved of his position at the head of the Chamber. The regulations of the Balearic Parliament establish that the expulsion of a deputy from his group implies the automatic termination of his institutional positions. This implies that Le Senne will be officially dismissed tomorrow when the Parliament Board transmits the expulsion request made by the critical sector of the party.
The Balearic Parliament is now in a complicated situation because the five rebel deputies expelled from Vox are left with control of the parliamentary group and with the financial income paid by the Chamber, while the two deputies who remain loyal to Abascal and are active in Vox will pass to be non-attached deputies without their own funds and with few possibilities to intervene and present proposals.
The internal crisis of Vox will also have effects on the governability of the Balearic Islands, since the president, Marga Prohens, depends on the ultra party to have the majority in the Chamber. The PP won 25 deputies in the last regional elections, which leaves the popular party five seats short of an absolute majority. Therefore, Prohens is tied in this legislature to the five rebel parliamentarians in order to govern and carry out proposals in Parliament such as, for example, the budgets.
The PP has not revealed for now whether the president will continue to rely on critics to govern or if she will break with them and maintain her pact with the official Vox sector. Yesterday, the Balearic president tried to minimize the effects of this crisis and limited it to the parliamentary sphere. Prohens asked for responsibility, assured that it is an internal crisis of Santiago Abascal’s party that will only have consequences in the Parliament and not in the Government and insisted that the PP will continue to govern as before.
Vox’s serious crisis has been brewing for months, with a constant clash between the party’s leadership on the islands and the members of the parliamentary group. These divisions made it possible for the Balearic Islands to be the only community in which the PP was able to form a government alone, without the presence of representatives of the ultra party in Prohens’ team. The national leadership distrusted the intentions of the deputies and avoided giving them more power with portfolios in the Government.
This veto to enter the Executive has been deteriorating relations between the parliamentary group and the party during all these months and the first challenge was seen last October, when the deputies refused to support the spending ceiling of the budgets for the year that is coming, despite indications from the national leadership to the contrary. That first crisis already forced the departure of one of the Vox deputies from the parliamentary group, who became non-attached.
Ignacio Garriga called the deputies to order, but the differences and mistrust between the national leadership and the regional deputies have been increasing. A few days ago the secretary general made a visit to the islands in which he did not meet with the parliamentary group, although he did meet with the municipal group in Palma.
The latest disagreement has had to do with discrepancies in linguistic matters. Vox has been very firm during all these months to demand that Prohens progressively replace Catalan with Spanish and has managed to get the Balearic Islands to implement the choice of language in the classrooms starting next year, but the party’s deputies did not support the proposal to create an Office for the Defense of Spanish, one of Abascal’s demands that was included in the programmatic agreement.
Last week, the national leadership asked the representatives on the islands to launch a statement against Prohens’ linguistic lukewarmness, but the deputies refused and the statement was signed by the president of the party. None of the rebel deputies attended the Vox assembly last weekend in which Santiago Abascal was confirmed as president of the formation.