Vox ex-deputies who have recently been purged from the electoral lists in the Congress of Deputies assure that the leader of the Popular Party in Extremadura, María Guardiola, “made a target” when on Tuesday she called the party’s political spokesman a “foreman of the feudal lord” ultra, Jorge Buxadé (Barcelona, ??1975). The vice-president of political action, after the president Santiago Abascal, has become the leader who concentrates the most power in the far-right party. With a Falangist past, Buxadé is in charge of piloting with an iron fist the pacts with the popular people in the different autonomous communities. Numerous voices place him as the natural replacement for Abascal, after having won the underground battle he maintains with Iván Espinosa de los Monteros.
At Vox’s headquarters, in Madrid’s Carrer de Bambú, two souls have been living together in the same party for some time. On the one hand, the liberal conservative, supposedly more moderate, which is led in the shadows by the marriage formed by the parliamentary speaker, Iván Espinosa de los Monteros, and the ultra leader in the Community of Madrid, Rocío Monasterio. And at the other end, the national Catholic party led by Buxadé and the indefatigable squire Ignacio Garriga, leader of Vox in Catalonia and general secretary of the party. A pair of incompatible ideological families that, according to internal sources, seem irreconcilable after Abascal gave more weight to the most ultra.
Sources close to Buxadé say that the State lawyer, who comes from a family linked to Opus Dei and the army, believes that Vox “was completely wrong” a few years ago when he facilitated governments for the Popular Party – as Andalusia or Madrid – and gave them external support. Buxadé is the one who coined the mantra that the far-right formation has been repeating since the last election night: “There will be neither gifts nor blackmail”. The “gifts” he speaks of were given by the same party in the past and there are not a few eyes that point to Espinosa de los Monteros, who at the time enjoyed more internal power in the ultra-right formation.
The vice-president of the party traveled at the beginning of the week to Extremadura, where the Bureau of the Parliament was constituted. Party sources say that they are convinced that, if Buxadé was not supervising the pacts, the negotiations in Extremadura would not have gone to waste. The argument from which the extreme right draws publicly is well known: to control that governments comply with the agreements, it is necessary to be part of the executives. In other words, Vox aims to be a kind of counter-power within the regional governments, which is why it demands, at the very least, an armchair. However, sources close to the negotiations claim that the Extremadura case was “the perfect opportunity” to “undress” the PP’s inconsistency. After the media uproar that has caused the failure of the talks, the sources are satisfied.
Time will tell if the strategy designed by Buxadé will be fruitful. But, for now, the party is buzzing around his figure. Some information published at the beginning of the week placed him as number one on the list for Barcelona in Congress in the next general elections, despite the fact that he himself had ruled himself out “completely” in informal conversations with journalists at the party’s headquarters. A destination like the Lower House would mean going to the train collision with the parliamentary speaker Espinosa de los Monteros. “A war that does not suit the party right now”, they explain from within the formation.
Of course, Buxadé has left his own stamp on the creation of the lists in Congress and the Senate. As number two for Madrid, there will be María de la Cabeza Ruiz Solas, right hand of her pawn, Garriga. There was Rocío Monasterio in many passages, which, with Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s absolute majority in the Assembly, will see his influence reduced. However, Vox has blocked his way.
