With the PP without resolving the succession of Carlos Mazón in the Valencian Generalitat, Vox doubles the pressure on Alberto Núñez Feijóo by opening a new front for him in Castilla-La Mancha. The far-right party associates the PP with the PSOE over its agreement on the reform of the Statute of Autonomy in what it calls the “penultimate scam of the two-party system”. Its renewal, the examination of which will be voted on next week in Congress, where everything indicates that it will go ahead, will bring the maximum number of deputies in the autonomous Parliament, which is currently 33 seats, to a maximum of 55 in the Cortes (the socialists have proposed that it could reach 59). The reform also provides that any change to the electoral law aimed at changing the number of deputies will require a strengthened majority of three fifths of the Chamber, i.e. the agreement of the two majority groups would be necessary. The socialist baron Emiliano García-Page was re-elected president of the region in 2023 with an absolute majority of 17 deputies, 12 from the PP and 4 from Vox.
“It is yet another example of what bipartisanship is. They are two parties that understand each other in two large blocs, in their main arguments they agree in a very high percentage. The PP is allied with the PSOE in Brussels, the main laws of recent years related to the climate issue or the bureaucratization of Europe are supported by the PP and the PSOE. Even in Spain they agree, like the renewal of the CGPJ, they don’t stop agreeing, like the rubbish tariff in front of the Vox, which opposes this entire climate agenda,” accused José María Figaredo, general secretary of Vox in Congress, ignoring that his party governed with the PP until July 2024 in five autonomous communities until breaking those coalitions and that it remained within a hundred municipal leaders with the popular ones. Feijóo’s strategy has nothing to do with that of Vox, with which he has undertaken a strategy of courting the far right to maintain the Generalitat and avoid elections in the Valencian Community.
The increase in the number of deputies responds, according to the PP and the PSOE, to demographic criteria. Vox argues that the current 33 should not be increased. In other communities, such as Asturias, the General Council has 45 deputies, while half the population of the Principality. Castilla y León or Euskadi, with a similar number of inhabitants to Castilla-La Mancha, have many more seats in their Parliaments (81 and 75 respectively).
The new articles also protect public services and incorporate the strategy to combat depopulation. It also limits the competence of regional deputies and the Government Council and introduces the figure of the decree law.
Before the press conference in its headquarters on Bambú street in Madrid, Vox released a video in which the national deputies of Castilla-La Mancha Manuel Mariscal and Ricardo Chamorro equate the PSOE and the PP, which Figaredo defined as “the red socialists and the blue socialists”.
“They don’t think about breeders, nor traders, nor self-employed workers, nor entrepreneurs, nor young people. They give priority to having more deputies, more councilors and more bars on the beach, such as embassies. Remember the embassies of the separatists, the ones they opened in Brussels to sell their political propaganda? Well, with this new statute of Castilla de la Mancha, the objective is to open embassies abroad to defend the same thing, the interests of the PP and the PSOE intend a regional agenda in the same style as the separatists, to impose more taxes on the population of Castile-La Mancha (…) and the green pact and the 2030 agenda,” they argue in the video. While the far right does not distinguish between PP and PSOE, inspired by the Catholic Monarchs’ motto “as much as it is, so much”, Feijóo is preparing for a negotiation in which Abascal will demand concessions on immigration, as he has already done, for example, in exchange for the approval of the Murcia budget in the summer with his abstention, and against green policies in response to climate change which, according to Vox, does not exist.
The second vice president of Castilla-La Mancha, José Manuel Caballero, asked Vox deputies, after their criticism of the reform of the Statute, to evaluate whether it is “coherent” for them to remain in the regional Parliament “when they are against autonomy and Castilla-La Mancha”. “Their position is incomprehensible, on the one hand they are representatives in the Cortes of Castilla-La Mancha, from there they receive their salary, from there they receive subsidies which we later discovered serve to finance their party at a national level, but at the same time they are against autonomy and Castilla-La Mancha,” he criticized. The state management of Vox had to return 34,345.64 euros to the Cortes of Castilla-La Mancha after the institution’s auditor found that they had been irregularly transferred from the parliamentary group of the regional Parliament to the party’s central fund in Madrid.
