The preludes to the meeting between the PP and the PSOE in Aragon did not predict an agreement, but rather the opposite. A few hours before the meeting with the minister and leader of the PSOE in Aragón, Pilar Alegría, the president of Aragón, Jorge Azcón, wrote a tweet that accompanied a quote for which she had to apologize. “It will be a pleasure to tell you that the fight against sexist violence is a priority for my Government, with the aim that cases like that of your friend Francisco Salazar do not go unpunished,” Azcón reproached him in his message on social networks.
Despite this climate of total political shock, Alegría assures that she has offered Azcón to open a negotiation to support the Budget, which according to the minister the popular president has rejected. “If Azcón calls elections it will be on a whim, out of personal interest or incompetence,” complained the PSOE candidate for the next elections in Aragon, which everything indicates will be held in February. The popular ones reply that they do not believe the negotiating will of the socialists. “They are not trustworthy.” [el PSOE] and, therefore, we cannot reach any type of agreement,” the Aragonese Treasury Minister, Roberto Bermúdez de Castro, later stated.
Alegría explained at a press conference in Zaragoza after the meeting with Azcón that she had offered to set up a technical commission to reach an agreement on the Budgets. The minister spokesperson for the Government of Pedro Sánchez has conveyed to the Aragonese president that, as proof of its willingness to agree, the PSOE would vote in favor of its path of stability.
The answer she has obtained, according to the socialist leader, is that the PP “does not trust” the PSOE. “Mr. Azcón has bitten that outstretched hand,” lamented Alegría, who believes that the Aragonese president makes “excuses either to agree with Vox or to take the autonomous community to elections.” Alegría has subsequently repeated up to four times that if, as everything indicates, the Aragonese president anticipates the elections in Aragon, it will be “on a whim, for personal interest, for incompetence or for all things at once.”
On the other hand, the PP maintains that the PSOE’s offer was an “imposture” and its outstretched hand, “a rotten hand.” “It is the most fake meeting I have ever participated in,” complained the Aragonese Treasury Minister. Bermúdez de Castro has described the socialist minister as “the most advantaged apprentice of [Pedro] Sánchez”.
The failure of the negotiation with the PSOE ends up underpinning a context that leads to early elections in Aragon next February, according to sources from the Aragonese PP. In reality, and the PP assumes that Azcón will call the polls in the coming days. If it did so next Monday, one of the possibilities that has gained more strength in recent hours, the elections would fall on February 8.
