Pedro Sánchez has blamed Alberto Núñez Feijóo and Santiago Abascal for the fact that Carlos Mazón remains president of the Valencian Community at the gates. “Why does Mazón continue? A year ago the negligence of one caused a tragedy and a year later its continuity has two people responsible: its political boss, Feijóo, and Abascal”, the President of the Government has blamed the head of the opposition and the leader of Vox in the launch of Carlos Martínez’s candidacy for the presidency of the Junta de Castilla y León, which is holding regional elections on March 15, and where the PSOE He has not governed since the late 1980s. “The management carried out by the Valencian Generalitat was negligent but the support of Feijóo and Abascal for him to continue leading the Valencian Community is indecent,” some 1,500 militants and sympathizers in León have previously added.
The president has not made a single allusion, implicit or explicit, to Junts’ latest threat. The leader of the party, Carlos Puigdemont, called his executive this Monday with the purpose of consulting the neoconvergent militancy if he should break the agreement with the PSOE that made Sánchez’s inauguration possible almost two years ago. The leader of the PSOE has not referred to his death either, a day after the state funeral for the dana. Before, on Tuesday, the former manager of the PSOE, Mariano Moreno, and a party employee for cash payments to the former socialist minister José Luis Ábalos and his former advisor Koldo García.
The PSOE has chosen to avoid this whole succession of risks and has focused on the weaknesses of the management of the PP barons and on questioning Feijóo’s leadership. “The resources are important, but the important thing, the decisive thing, are the convictions, are the principles, is believing in public policies. What has happened is that in Castilla y León the firefighters were cut and the mountains were set on fire. In Andalusia public outings were cut and women were left absolutely unprotected against the disease of breast cancer. In Valencia civil protection was cut and we had the most drastic gain in recent years in our country… It doesn’t matter if your name is Mazón, Azcón, Moreno Bonilla, Ayuso, Mañueco and a long list of PP presidents because they follow the same pattern: first what they do is cut public services. Secondly, what they do is bad management. And thirdly, they lie to try to cover up their incompetence and negligence,” Sánchez criticized without making distinctions.
The management of the fires is the last great asset for the PSOE in Castilla y León, the great bastion of the right. The last socialist president was Demetrio Madrid, who resigned in 1987 after a judicial investigation that came to nothing. Since then, the PP has concatenated governments and could only lose the Board in 2019, when Luis Tudanca—present at today’s event—won the elections. Albert Rivera truncated the change by ordering his party, Ciudadanos, to agree with the PP instead of with the PSOE, as its candidate, Francisco Igea, intended.
“A mayor for Castilla y León”
“We must open a path of hope and turn around 38 years of insidiousness, we must break dynamics, seduce the 33% of people who stay at home and who are not from the PP. We have to do it for the people of our land in the face of a government that forgets them,” highlighted Martínez, who recalled that in the last elections “the embrace of the right and extreme right was pioneering” in Castilla y León, putting the focus on the first fact between PP and Vox in an autonomous Executive, already with Feijóo in Genoa after the rebellion of barons that overthrew his predecessor, Pablo Casado. “The trust we ask for is not to govern but to open a new political time in this community, with a collective project for the nine provinces,” added Martínez, general secretary of Castilla y León since February and mayor of Soria in 2007. His resistance to leaving the City Council until the regional elections are held is causing him the first criticism within the federation.
The motto chosen to announce the candidate for the Board in the elections scheduled for March 15 at the latest is “A mayor for Castilla y León“However, the appeal to municipalism, with which the PSOE hopes to “end resignation” and mobilize the progressive electorate in a community that the PP has governed uninterruptedly since 1987 – surpassing the 36 of the socialists in Andalusia, where the popular ones appealed to change when they were in opposition -, has also shown the seams of the PSOE. The election of León, divided between The supporters of the provincial secretary, Javier Cendón, and José Antonio Díez, the mayor of the provincial capital, one of three with a socialist councilor in the community along with Soria and Palencia, have reignited the internal fights.
Díez, mayor since 2019 and general secretary of the city group since 2012 – it is one of the largest in Spain with 900 militants – has been the most notable absence after being excluded from the group of speakers. The mayor, the most visible face in his party of Leonesism, the movement that demands that the province obtain the status of autonomy in the face of the abandonment and reparations that he attributes to the double centralism of Madrid and Valladolid, went to Ayamonte (Huelva) to defend the city’s candidacy to host the National Congress of Brotherhoods and Brotherhoods of Our Lady of Angustias in 2027. “I’m going to be where I have to be, with the Leonese. They won’t miss me, but it’s reciprocal,” he explained his absence. “There are people who believe they are the center of the universe,” replied Cendón, who was part of the exclusive group of deputies who did not separate from Santos Cerdán in Congress until the former Secretary of Organization entered provisional prison in June for his alleged role in the corrupt plot that Ábalos and Koldo García completed.
“President, you breathe strength, enthusiasm and hope for our land,” Cendón began his speech, placing emphasis on fire management, with more than 160,000 hectares burned this summer in Castilla y León. “When we go together, colleagues, there is no one to stop us, and they are not going to stop us,” said another Leonese, Nuria Bravo, number two of the federation and related to Cendón. Of the two ministers of Castilla y León, Óscar Puente and Ana Redondo, the head of Transport and provincial secretary of Valladolid has not attended either. The Minister of Equality has put her party’s event before the march against cancer in her city, Valladolid, which broke its record with more than 52,000 participants. Former president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero has not attended either, despite the fact that his presence in the province where he was born was initially considered.
