The new leadership of Ciudadanos reiterates its rejection of Vox's motion of no confidence

Although Inés Arrimadas had been in favor of presenting a motion of censure against the President of the Government and had urged the PP to lead it, the new leadership of Ciudadanos has turned around this criterion and has been opposed to the measure finally promoted by the far-right, before which he has expressed a frontal rejection, which contrasts with the abstention in which the popular ones will rely.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
24 February 2023 Friday 15:35
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The new leadership of Ciudadanos reiterates its rejection of Vox's motion of no confidence

Although Inés Arrimadas had been in favor of presenting a motion of censure against the President of the Government and had urged the PP to lead it, the new leadership of Ciudadanos has turned around this criterion and has been opposed to the measure finally promoted by the far-right, before which he has expressed a frontal rejection, which contrasts with the abstention in which the popular ones will rely.

As he had been doing since November, on February 7, Arrimadas insisted before the media, in an appearance as spokesman for Ciudadanos in Congress, that the president of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, should be in charge of defending the motion of censure and to present herself as a government alternative to Pedro Sánchez: "If I were the leader of the opposition, I would have no doubts," said Arrimadas then, for whom the motion of no confidence was a "useful tool."

Already at that time, the new leadership of the party, headed by Adrián Vázquez as general secretary and Patricia Guasp as political spokesperson, ruled out this possibility, thus amending the previous party president, and stressed that the position of Ciudadanos is that of demand early elections as a step prior to the change of government that, in the opinion of the liberal formation, Spain needs.

And in this same line, Guasp has once again influenced this week, after the announcement that finally the presentation of the motion, which Ramón Tamames will defend as the candidate proposed by Vox, will be formalized next Monday in Congress: "The Sánchez government is the worst government in the history of our democracy, but Vox's motion is useless. We will vote against it because this option does not guarantee progress, freedom, equality and a better future for Spaniards," he said on Twitter.

In a press conference held this afternoon in the port of Valencia, after a meeting of the national committee designed to launch the candidacies of Mamen Peris as a candidate to preside over the Generalitat and Fernando Giner as mayor in the capital of the Valencian Community, the spokeswoman de Ciudadanos has added that the decision to vote against the motion of no confidence is shared "by all", but has not clarified whether it will be Arrimadas herself who defends the party's position in the debate.

If "at some point it was useful due to Sánchez's continuous abuses of the rule of law with the reduction of the crime of embezzlement", today the Vox motion "is useless due to the times in which we find ourselves", pointed out Guasp, who also has questioned the choice of the almost ninety-year-old economist Ramón Tamames as a candidate to defend it. "Nobody believes that Mr. Tamames aspires to occupy the presidency of Spain," the Ciudadanos candidate for mayor of Barcelona, ​​Anna Grau, had warned yesterday, who sees the motion as a "parliamentary fencing" between Vox and the PP.

"We have no doubt that the Sánchez government, supported by populists and communists, is the worst democratic government in Spain, but the solution is to call elections, in which Ciudadanos will offer as an alternative a project to reform the country" , the spokeswoman concluded, who sees Sánchez waiting to "show off" in the European presidency thanks to Next Generation funds, dedicated to "winning captive votes" instead of "transforming" the economy, a purpose to which she also Guasp attributes the increase in pensions.

This change is due, explains Ciudadanos, to the fact that the motion of censure was defended at the end of last year as a way to stop the reform of the Criminal Code to repeal the crime of sedition and modify the crime of embezzlement, something that was seen, by the formation that Arrimadas presided over at the time, as a concession by the Sánchez government to the Catalan independence movement and especially to ERC, to whom it "has been sold". But currently, with this legislative change already in force, the Vox initiative, ensures the new orange dome, is meaningless.