Vox has managed to water a hundred agreements with its ideological flags – the vast majority, with the Popular Party – to govern city councils for the next four years. Among them, six provincial capitals: Valladolid, Burgos, Guadalajara, Toledo, Castellón and Ciudad Real. The extreme right has prioritized in the negotiations the areas that allow it from within the institutions to continue waging its particular cultural battle, despite being councilors with few powers and a meager budget.
The president of Vox, Santiago Abascal, already warned this, after knowing the results of 28-M, which consolidated the ultra formation as a third political force. "That the Popular Party does not expect gifts." According to party sources, this was the starting point of some negotiations in which Vox has prioritized making "ideological councilors" disappear -in reference to those of Equality-, dealing with citizen security areas to "put order in the streets” and the power to revert the aid destined “to the progressive ideological agenda” to allocate it “to pregnant women” or early schooling.
The first agreement – signed last Tuesday in front of a hermitage – between PP and Vox to jointly govern a large city was in Elx. There the extreme right will occupy the departments of Family, Industrial Economy and Countryside, and that of Equality and LGTBI will disappear. In this way, the ultras materialize two of their workhorses during the electoral campaign: the promise to eliminate portfolios that, in their opinion, "squander" citizens' money because "they do not solve their problems" and the closed support for rural areas, in the one that those of Vox consider that they have a barn of votes to exploit in the face of the next elections.
The group led by Santiago Abascal congratulated itself yesterday, through a press release, for having managed to secure security areas in "dozens of municipalities" to work on "the eradication of violence, occupation, sexual assaults and all kinds of street crimes.” It is another of the mantras that were repeated in any electoral act of this party. In his opinion, Spain suffers from a serious problem of citizen insecurity –despite the fact that the statistics from the Ministry of the Interior dismantle this theory–, which is mostly caused by irregular immigrants, whom they call illegal. It is confirmed that they will be in charge of the Citizen Security departments in Burgos and Valladolid, waiting to find out the distribution of portfolios in other large capitals such as Toledo.
Abascal's hard core has supervised all possible pacts from his headquarters in Madrid. There they have been pending a list of 135 municipalities in which their votes were essential. And from there it has been dictated to the local levels how they should act. In these guidelines, the ultra-right has been clear at all times that one of the councils with which they had to rise up was that of Culture, a minefield where they could agitate their cultural guerrilla. His particular crusade against historical memory. They will pilot the municipal Culture policies in Valladolid, Burgos, Calvià (Mallorca), Ponferrada (León), Talavera de la Reina (Toledo)...
In Vox they are convinced that their main fishing ground for votes is that citizen outraged against feminist policies, "illegal" immigrants, the institutional abandonment suffered by rural areas... and also against climate change policies. In the more than one hundred agreements signed, they have managed to include the maintenance of vehicle circulation permits for more than 25 years, in addition to creating plans to reduce "low emission zones to the minimum possible" with the aim of eliminating them. A promise made to neighbors and merchants during the electoral contest. "Like all the milestones achieved", they congratulate themselves.
