The mayor of València, María José Catalá, yesterday presided over the traditional tribute that the Valencia City Council celebrates each year to honor the people who become centenarians during those 12 months. On Tuesday she also visited the start of the installation of the fire defense system in El Saler. In both cases, her presence left Vox councilor José Gosálbez, responsible for the Mayor's and Albufera portfolios, in the background.
Although the mayor's team denies that there is any slogan to eclipse Vox ("the mayor always attends to everything important"), the truth is that both examples denote that in a city council the mayor always has options to eclipse his partners. . The first mayor does not need to be invited and she can preside over any event she considers, municipal sources explain to La Vanguardia.
Political theory says that in a coalition government the big guy usually eats the little guy. It was seen in the pact between Unión Valenciana and the PP and in a certain way it has been seen in the last elections in the Botànic, where the PSPV is the only one that grew from the tripartite. And it is difficult to stand out within a government, especially if the distribution of council offices does not allow you to attract the focus of the media and citizens.
Be that as it may, these first weeks of co-government between the PP and Vox have helped to significantly reduce the tension in the Valencia City Council, where the Popular Party suffered almost in every vote because Vox threatened not to behave, precisely, as a preferred partner.
However, with the arrival of Abascal's team to the Government team, the pressure has been reduced significantly. Although there is still a certain distrust, the forms have changed, as could be seen last Monday when the Vox spokesperson, Juanma Bádenas, highlighted the stability that the entry of its four councilors into the City Council Government has brought.
That does not mean that the far-right councilors are going to renounce their principles. Gosálbez was at the protests in front of the PSPV headquarters on Monday and Bádenas did not hesitate to describe Gay Games as "an invention of cultural Marxism, of the political left and the defenders of identity politics who seek to impose absolutist ideas on our society." However, he is not afraid for governability and the budgets will be approved without wear or tension next Tuesday the 14th.
In the PP they believe that after these first weeks of coupling, when Vox discovers its loss of prominence, there may be some departure from tone, but they understand that with the entry into the local Executive, they have managed to tame the beast.
Catalá now has the same stability in its government that the president of the Generalitat, Carlos Mazón, has enjoyed from minute one, who although he has to put out some fires and listen to statements from his Vox councilors - they also do not make too much noise beyond his appearances in Les Corts -, he has addressed his government's roadmap in the form of budgets and legislative changes through the Law of Accompaniment to the 2024 accounts.
