With the hangover from this Wednesday’s meeting in Mérida, the leadership of the PP and Vox have agreed this Thursday that the negotiation is moving towards the formation of a coalition government in Extremadura with María Guardiola as president. However, faced with the great optimism shown by the Popular Party, the ultras try to appease their spirits in public with direct attacks on the national leadership of Alberto Núñez Feijóo. “It seems that we are moving forward despite the missteps of Genoa,” said the spokesperson for the extreme right in Congress, Pepa Millán, in the corridors of the Lower House, just a few hours after the opening of the expulsion file for one of its purged former leaders, Iván Espinosa de los Monteros, became known. For José María Figaredo’s deputy, the internal disputes of his party “come from Genoa and Feijóo’s direct environment.”
Figaredo was with the general secretary of the PP, Miguel Tellado, this Wednesday in Mérida, at the meeting to address the regional Executive. Also from Congress, this Thursday, Tellado celebrated that Vox had “returned to the negotiating table.” Both formations came out of the match showing good harmony and with the ultras pointing to the support of Guardiola. “Everything is going very well. It is very good news that we are working to give a Government in Extremadura. We are working at a negotiation table, the negotiation has been unblocked,” said Tellado. An enthusiasm that has been shared by the Deputy Secretary of Territorial Policy of the PP, Elías Bendodo, who has also shown himself “convinced” of the agreement after PP and Vox brought their positions closer together at the Mérida meeting. “It is very good news,” said Bendodo. “We cannot disappoint the growth expectations in Extremadura and in the other autonomous communities that have been deposited at the polls by citizens,” he added.
Sources from the PP, both Extremaduran and national, assure that the agreement will materialize after Easter. And that the investiture session would probably be the following week. Before Wednesday’s meeting, a lot of work had already been advanced, as the PP reiterates. However, as it has been doing for days, Vox shows that Genoa’s position prevents a complete agreement. “The PP knows the obstacle and the impediment” that keeps the pact blocked, Millán specified this Thursday, without revealing more details, insisting that “at this time the PP must be the only interlocutor” and the negotiations must be carried out “in strict privacy.”
Among Vox’s requests to the popular in Extremadura are the “end of Mercosur and the Green Pact”, the “priority of Spaniards in health”, the “end of demographic replacement policies”, “the family at the center of all policies”, the “end of indoctrination in the classrooms” and the “rejection of the agreements reached by the PP and the PSOE in Europe.” But PP sources assure that these issues were not discussed at the negotiating table this Wednesday in Extremadura. And that it was only limited to regional technical matters related to housing matters; tax reduction; of others related to agriculture – such as the Tierra de Barros irrigation project -, and of the reduction of the eco-tax in the continuity of the Almaraz nuclear power plant.
This Wednesday’s appointment came more than three months after the Extremaduran elections that Guardiola brought forward precisely so as not to depend on Vox, but in which the extreme right once again had the key to the Government. “Our aspiration is that we can achieve a stable and lasting Government for about four years and that guarantees the alternative that Extremadurans have asked for,” reiterated the Vox spokesperson in Congress, who in any case added that “they want to be optimistic” because their objective is to reach the agreement that allows them to implement their policies. “We want not only to repeal those policies that have been bad and that the PP has maintained, but Vox is called to carry out that alternative and materialize it,” he said.
For her part, the spokesperson for Unidas por Extremadura, Irene de Miguel, is not clear that both parties have reached an agreement because she is convinced that Santiago Abascal does not mind “sacrificing Extremadura” if that is good for him to “give Feijóo a coup.” The spokesperson has criticized “the shabby farce of negotiations that are not negotiations”, since the only thing we have to wait for, in her opinion, is for “Mr Abascal to give the green light”.
