The leadership of Vox in the Region of Murcia resigned this Thursday en bloc, leaving only the until now regional president of the party, José Ángel Antelo, to force his departure. Sources from the ultra formation have confirmed to EL PAÍS this march in full of the Provincial Executive Committee (CEP) “due to a profound disagreement with the management” of the until now president, and it will be a manager appointed by the national leadership who will now take the reins of the formation.
Specifically, the national deputy Lourdes Méndez, who held the vice presidency of Vox Murcia, has left her positions; Carmen Menduiña, who was his secretary; Antonio Martínez Nieto, in charge of Institutional Relations; Antonio Martínez Sánchez, head of Intermunicipal, and Aida Peñalver, head of Territorial Organization.
The resignation of all of them, the same sources point out, has the “express objective of allowing the national leadership of the party to take the reins and resolve a serious crisis of internal cohesion that has worsened significantly in recent times.”
Since this Thursday morning, the idea that Antelo, who has led Vox Murcia since 2020, would be replaced by another member of the formation has already been considered. The provincial president himself was appointed by the national leadership of Vox to preside over the management company that replaced the previous team, led by Pascual Salvador. He continues to be a deputy in the Murcia Regional Assembly and has already gone through another major crisis for the party: he was the only one of the four deputies that Vox had in the Autonomous Chamber in 2020 who was not expelled from the party due to disagreements with the national leadership over the accounts of the parliamentary group, a matter that ended up in court.
With the resignation en bloc of the CEP, the national leadership will now call for a manager to reorganize the regional formation. Antelo is scheduled to appear before the media tomorrow from Molina de Segura.
In recent weeks, several leaders of the ultra formation have passed through Murcia and have met with different party officials. Antelo has recently had disagreements with the Vox spokesperson in Murcia capital, Luis Gestoso, who is a member of the National Executive Committee of Vox and a personal friend of Abascal. Gestoso, however, denied any movement this Thursday morning and attributed the visits of the national leadership to the usual activity of the formation to “coordinate” its policies. “I haven’t seen any movement against anyone,” he said.
Born 38 years ago in Santiago de Compostela, Antelo was a professional basketball player before dedicating himself to politics, but an injury kept him off the court in 2017. The Universidad Católica San Antonio de Murcia (UCAM), for whose team he played at that time, hired him in its Sports Marketing department and, from that institution, to which other senior officials of Vox Murcia are linked, such as its parliamentary spokesperson, Rubén Martínez Alpañez, he made the leap into politics as a member of Vox almost from the beginning of the formation in Murcia.
In 2023, after the regional elections, in which the PP was the most voted list but did not achieve an absolute majority, Vox agreed with Fernando López Miras, who appointed Antelo vice president of his government. He left in July 2024, which promoted the departure of Vox from all the autonomous governments in which it had agreed with the PP, using as an argument the disagreements with those of Alberto Núñez Feijóo on immigration matters. However, Antelo agreed again with López Miras in September 2025. Among the conditions that were agreed upon, the reform of the law for the protection of the Mar Menor, the withdrawal of subsidies to employers and unions,
This latest movement within Vox comes after the expulsion from the party of Javier Ortega Smith, its spokesperson in the Madrid City Council, as well as the councilors who supported him in his confrontation with the party leader, Santiago Abascal. Shortly after the news of the en bloc resignation became known, Ortega Smith came out to support Antelo, whom he referred to as “a great person and great patriot who has managed to lift the Vox project in the Region of Murcia.” “Time puts everyone in their place,” the former member of the ultra party.
