skip past newsletter promotionĪlberto Núñez Feijóo, national leader of the People’s party. It’s totally contradictory for Guardiola to be invested here with Vox’s votes because she didn’t win the most votes,” De Miguel said. “Feijóo has been saying again and again that the party that wins the most votes should be allowed to govern. In Extremadura, that party was the Spanish Socialist Workers party (PSOE) of the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez. She also noted the PP’s national leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, had repeatedly insisted that the party that won the largest share of the votes should be allowed to govern. So if she doesn’t have her word any more, what does she have? Nothing.”ĭe Miguel said that rather than tackling housing, employment, depopulation and the region’s energy economy, the new PP-Vox administration was focusing on culture war issues, such as repealing the Democratic Memory Law and an ideological scrutiny of what children are taught in Extremadura’s schools. “They’ve made her go back on her word when she came out and said that her word was all she had. “The PP have chucked Guardiola under the bus they’ve sold her out and they’ve humiliated her,” said Irene de Miguel, the leader of the leftwing Podemos party in the region. Others in Extremadura were more forthright. While she wasn’t too bothered by Guardiola’s decision to hand Vox the regional ministry for forest management, hunting and fishing, Concha said the party should not be allowed to influence environmental and farming policy, “because of their denial of climate change”. “It wasn’t a surprise that Guardiola did the deal – it was only logical that she’d make a deal, because you don’t want to lose out on governing,” she said. Photograph: Santiago Urquijo/Getty ImagesĬoncha, a self-confessed “textbook social democrat” who had taken her grandson to a park not far from Cáceres’s imposing main square, was also far from stunned. The old town of Cáceres, in Extremadura, which is the home town of the region’s new president, María Guardiola. “Why did Guardiola change her mind?” asked one local man, rhetorically. Given the precedents and the pragmatic nature of Spanish politics, few people on the streets of Guardiola’s home town of Cáceres were taken aback by her sudden U-turn. Less than two years later, the PP brushed aside such reservations and formed its first coalition regional government with Vox in Castilla y León. Unlike Vox, added Casado, the PP didn’t want to be “another party of fear, of rage, of resentment and revenge, of insults and skirmishes, nor of manipulation, lies and backwards opposition”. In October 2020, the PP’s then leader, Pablo Casado – whose party had relied on Vox’s support to prop up three of its regional governments – finally eviscerated the far-right outfit for being populists who peddled “easy – and usually fake – solutions to complex problems”. It was not the first time that the PP – which could well form a national coalition government with Vox if, as expected, it falls short of an absolute majority on Sunday – has tied itself up in knots over its relationship with the far-right party. Yet on Monday this week, Guardiola was sworn in as Extremadura’s president after forming a coalition with Vox and deciding that, on reflection, “ my word isn’t as important as the future of the people of Extremadura”. “I can’t allow those who deny gender-based violence … those who are dehumanising immigrants and those who unfurl a banner chucking the LGBTI flag into the bin into government,” she insisted. Guardiola was having none of it and said she would be prepared to stand in a repeat of the regional elections rather than countenance any deals with Vox, adding that her word was all she had.
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