With the Castile and León prototype already in operation, the autonomous elections of May 28 offered the PP the opportunity to govern, together with Vox, five more autonomous communities. Three months later, that possibility is already a fact, but the game of cards in which it has been contested, from the lightning pact in the Valencian Community in June to the recent agreement at the last moment in Murcia, has been full of vicissitudes .
Valencia opens the game
The main one was the advance of the generals, which caught Alberto Núñez Feijóo off guard. Whatever might happen, Carlos Mazón hastened to close an agreement with the ultra-right with some basic lines, in the preliminary version, written in high-sounding sentences not very well drafted, in the style of “signs of identity, to defend and recover our signs of identity”.
The Valencian president managed to get Vox to accept the only red line that had been drawn in Genoa – to exclude the far-right candidate, convicted of abuse, Carlos Flores – and saw the field open to launch the investiture, in which he ceded a vice-presidency with responsibilities in Culture and two ministries, that of Agriculture and that of Justice, Interior and Governance. The areas that Santiago Abascal’s party reserves to mark its positions in the ideological debate.
The 50 points in which the Valencian agreement between the two formations was shaped contain the principles that are repeated, with nuances depending on the territory, in the pacts that came later and that respond to the interest of the ultra-right to print its seal: freedom, family, rural world, water, reduction of political spending, security…
These epigraphs announce a whole declaration of intentions about the unity of Spain, illegal immigration, the occupation of homes, traditions… The favorite topics of the ultra ideology, which introduces concepts such as “domestic violence” or generalizations about “parental freedom” to authorize extracurricular activities, the famous parental veto, which he has tried to impose on all signed agreements.
Balearics ups the ante
In case this program was not clear enough, it is detailed in the 110 points in which the pact of the Balearic Islands is specified, in which the popular Marga Prohens only needed the abstention of Vox to be president. The far-right agreed to stay out of the Government in exchange for conditioning it from a monitoring commission that assesses the degree of compliance with what has been agreed.
The Balearic agreement does not propose removing subsidies to “entities that promote Catalan countries”, as the Valencian one does, but it does propose to eliminate regulations that contribute “to confrontation and division” and talks about “linguistic peculiarities of the Balearic Islands” to refer to Catalan, the knowledge of which is no longer a requirement in public health.
The bullfights, which minors will be able to attend following a change in the law that prohibited them from entering the bullring, deserve their own chapter in the Balearic Islands agreement, which served as a model for all the following.
The letter from Extremadura
At the end of June, already in the middle of the electoral maelstrom, the third and most controversial of the pacts arrived. The fine print of the agreements in Valencia and the Balearic Islands put lead in Feijóo’s wings, forced to balance with the ultra-right. María Guardiola, the candidate of the PP in Extremadura, had to rectify: “My word is not as important as the future of the people of Extremadura”, she justified herself after saying that she would not govern with “those who deny sexist violence, dehumanize the immigrants and throw the LGTBI flag into a bin”.
Scarlett O’Hara from Extremadura was ordered by Génova, under enormous media pressure, to swallow her pride and create for Vox a Ministry of Forestry and Rural Management, with skills in hunting, fishing and bulls, the emblems of the match His government pact envisages lifting environmental limitations and wants the continuity of the Almaraz nuclear power plant.
The poker of Aragon
Discreetly, without showing his cards, Jorge Azcón prolonged the game until after the general elections and until August he did not come to an agreement with the ultra-right to form a government in Aragon. A vice presidency of Territorial Development, Depopulation and Justice and a Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock was the price of the transfer to Vox.
Despite the fact that many points are identical to those of the Balearic Islands, the Aragonese pact does explicitly mention “sexist violence” and refers to the drought because, unlike the “water for everyone” in Valencia and Murcia, they want to expand irrigation , tiptoe through the complex chapter of the Ebro water. To finish, he puts himself on guard regarding “the lies and self-interested manipulations of exclusionary and expansionist Catalan nationalism”. A difficult neighborhood.
Murcia closes the game
Fernando López Miras closed the round. It was difficult for the Murcian president to accept the verdict of the polls and he was about to repeat elections, a risk that he might have run with the previous electoral system, which divided Murcia into four constituencies, and if the leader of his party had not of facing an investiture with a single weighty ally, Vox.
The far-right will have a vice-presidency with powers in Security, Interior and Emergencies and the Ministry of Development. In the government pact, very vague on issues as crucial as the ecological balance of the Mar Menor, it highlights, in addition to the demand for a new National Hydrological Plan that guarantees the growth of the “pantry of Europe”, the reform of the financing system, a demand shared by the other autonomies except Aragon, which does not mention it.
