With the prototype of Castilla y León already in operation, the regional elections of May 28 offered the PP the opportunity to govern, hand in hand with Vox, in five other autonomous communities. Three months later, that possibility is already a fact, but the game of cards in which it has been played, from the lightning pact in the Valencian Community in June to the recent agreement on the horn in Murcia, has been full of adventures.
The main one was the advance of the generals, which caught Alberto Núñez Feijóo off guard. Whatever might happen, Carlos Mazón rushed to close an agreement with the extreme right whose basic lines, in its preliminary version, were high-sounding phrases not very well written such as “signs of identity, to defend and recover our signs of identity.”
The Valencian president managed to get Vox to assume the only red line that had been drawn in Genoa – leaving the far-right candidate, convicted of ill-treatment, Carlos Flores, out of the game – and saw the field open to launch himself into the investiture, in which he gave up a vice presidency with powers in Culture and two ministries, that of Agriculture and that of Justice, Interior and Government. The areas that Santiago Abascal's party reserves to mark its positions in the ideological debate.
The 50 points in which the Valencian agreement between both parties was expressed contain the principles that are repeated, with nuances depending on the territory, in those that came later, which respond to the interest of the extreme right to leave its mark: freedom, family, rural world, water, reduction in political spending, security...
These headings announce a declaration of intent on the unity of Spain, illegal immigration, the occupation of homes, traditions... The favorite themes of the ultra ideology, which slips into the document concepts such as "domestic violence" or generalizations about the “parental freedom” to authorize extracurricular activities, the famous parental veto, which he has tried to impose in all the signed agreements.
In case this program was not clear enough, it is detailed in the 110 points in which the Balearic Pact is specified, where the popular Marga Prohens only needed the abstention of Vox to be president. The extreme right agreed to stay out of the Government in exchange for conditioning it from a monitoring commission that evaluates the degree of compliance with what was agreed.
The Balearic agreement does not propose removing subsidies to “entities that promote Catalan countries”, as the Valencian one does, but it does propose eliminating regulations that contribute “to confrontation and division” and speaks of “the linguistic peculiarities of the Balearic Islands” to refer to the Catalan, whose knowledge is no longer a requirement in public health.
The bullfights, to which minors will be able to go following a modification of the law that prohibited their access to the bullrings, deserve their own chapter in the Balearic agreement, which served as a model for all the following ones.
At the end of June, already in the midst of the electoral maelstrom, the third and most controversial of the pacts arrived. The fine print of the Valencia and Balearic Islands agreements put lead on Feijóo's wings, forced to balance with the extreme right. María Guardiola, the PP candidate in Extremadura, had to rectify: "My word is not as important as the future of the people of Extremadura", she justified herself after saying that she would not govern with "those who deny sexist violence, dehumanize immigrants and they throw the LGTBI flag into a trash can.”
Scarlett O'Hara from Extremadura was ordered by Genoa, under enormous media pressure, to swallow her pride and create for Vox a Ministry of Forest Management and the Rural World, with competitions in hunting, fishing and bullfighting, the emblems of the party. His government pact plans to remove environmental limitations and calls for the continuity of the Almaraz nuclear power plant.
Discreetly, without showing his cards, Jorge Azcón extended the game until after the generals and it was not until August that he agreed to agree with the ultra-right to form a government in Aragon. A vice presidency of Territorial Development, Depopulation and Justice and a Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock was the price of the assignment.
Although many points are identical to those of the Balearic Islands, the Aragonese pact does explicitly mention “sexist violence” and refers to drought, unlike the “water for all” of Valencia and Murcia, which want to expand irrigation, tiptoe by the thorny chapter of the Ebro water. Finally, he is on guard against “the lies and self-serving manipulations of exclusive and expansionist Catalan nationalism.” A difficult neighborhood.
Fernando López Miras closed the round. The Murcian president found it difficult to accept the verdict of the polls and was on the point of repeating the elections, something that he might have risked with the previous electoral system, which divided Murcia into four constituencies, and if the leader of his party did not have to face an investiture with a single strong ally, Vox.
The extreme right will have a vice presidency with powers in Security, Interior and Emergencies and the Ministry of Development. In the government pact, very vague on issues as crucial as the ecological balance of the Mar Menor, it highlights, in addition to the demand for a new National Hydrological Plan that guarantees the growth of "Europe's pantry", the reform of the financing system , demand shared by the other autonomies except Aragon, which does not cite it.
