The Popular Party (PP) was proclaimed this Sunday the winner of the municipal elections in Cartagena with better results than all the polls gave it: it grew almost ten thousand votes compared to the 2019 elections that allow it to go from seven to ten councilors, although they are insufficient even to govern in a minority. Noelia Arroyo keeps her chances of continuing in the mayoralty intact if she agrees with another party. A priori, the candidate for this would be Vox, which rises from two to four councilors. But Arroyo warned last night that the PP “is a center party and can agree on the left and the right” in a clear reference to the PSOE. Manuel Torres’ socialists will be represented in the City Council by four members, two less than he obtained four years ago: more than 6,700 votes are left in this transit.
Another big loser of the night was the MC of José López. Although he repeated the result of 2019, when he was the list with the most votes, the eight councilors achieved fell short of the absolute majority to which he aspired throughout the campaign. He lost just over a hundred votes. At his electoral headquarters in Los Dolores there were long faces. The results were even more disappointing for the Podemos-IU-AV coalition, which was left out of the City Council after having had two representatives during the last legislature. Ciudadanos also lost theirs. He barely had a thousand votes.
castejon continues
The one who finally did manage to enter the new Corporation is the acting vice mayor, Ana Belén Castejón, whose new party, Sí Cartagena, obtained five thousand votes, the minimum necessary for it. Last night Castejón thanked the support of the citizens “who have believed in our project and who give us more strength to continue working for and for Cartagena.”
A priori, Castejón’s result is inconsequential for the aspirations of who has been his partner for the last four years. Her vote is no longer essential to form a government. When Noelia Arroyo looks to her right, where Vox is, and then to the left, where the PSOE is located, she sees four councilors on each side who, together with the ten popular ones, make up the fourteen that mark the absolute majority of the Corporation cartagenera. «We are a party of the center and we can add to the right or to the left. Although the important thing tonight is to celebrate the victory. We have grown a lot and we face the responsibility of forming a government team, “she warned.
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Shielding soil in the Mar Menor
The new general urban plan will leave several parcels as non-buildable land to avoid the construction of 14,000 homes. -
full employment
It intends to promote the defense industry, international trade, the audiovisual sector and green hydrogen. -
Housing and older.
He wants to give rental incentives and encourage active aging.
His idea, he said, is to work with any party that allows him to establish a “solid and stable government” that exercises its functions “responsibly.” And he warned that his priority at the head of the City Council is to give it “stability and continue the growth” of Cartagena. The most voted candidate has three weeks ahead to talk with all the parties and make decisions before the constitution of the new Corporation.
MC stagnates
In this regard, the Vox candidate, Diego Salinas, was “very satisfied” with the result obtained and said that his party is the only determining factor in forming the new government team. “We are clearly the key,” he told LA VERDAD. He does not see the possibility that the PP can govern with occasional help from the PSOE.
The night was bitter in Podemos, Cs and also in MC, whose leader, José López, said that his first assessment “cannot be good because we have not grown” and they hoped to do so. “We understand that a national vote has been taken, against [Pedro] Sánchez and that the electorate is either not mature or is too mature and does not know how to differentiate between some [elecciones] national, regional and local. It is a result that we have to accept.”
The seventh party with the most votes was Más Región-VE, with 1,207 votes, far from the number needed to obtain a councilor. Participation in Cartagena reached 60.13%, five points more than in 2019.
Profile | The journalist who prefers progress to power
«It is fireproof. She is the first to get to work very early in the morning and the last to disconnect”, they say in the environment of Noelia Arroyo Hernández (Cartagena, 1979). Those who have shared the last four years with her in the Cartagena City Council, where she served as vice mayor for the first two and later as mayor, assure that she is “incombustible.” And that sometimes “it goes by” lengthening her days.
Arroyo has made relentless work his way of life since he finished his university studies in Audiovisual Communication at UCAM and the radio master’s degree at RTVE. He reached the political front line at the beginning of 2015 from the press office of the Ministry of Economy and Finance. President Pedro Antonio Sánchez surprisingly appointed her in April 2015 Minister of Culture and spokesperson for the regional government. In 2017 she repeated as counselor for Transparency and Spokesperson and in 2019 she made the leap to local politics. Despite being from Cartagena from Icue, she was received by her great political rivals as her enemy due to her years of work and residence in Murcia.
In her first elections as a candidate for mayor, in 2019, she was left one seat behind the MC of José López; and she obtained three less than the PP four years before. But she managed to braid an unexpected agreement with the then socialist Ana Belén Castejón and Manuel Padín, from Cs, to prevent the most voted list from governing in a minority. She had to achieve, they argued, that the municipality progress away from the fights of the previous legislature. The reader will assess whether they achieved the first objective; the second is clearly yes.
In the last four years, Arroyo has been appointed general secretary of the Cartagena PP, although internal voices assure that she is little fond of accumulating organic power, that hers are the institutions. What they also assure is that she “wins in short distances” and that in her few free moments she does not go as mayor. Her neighbors from the Santa Ana residential area see her little because of her urbanization: one day she will be walking with her family, in the supermarket or at the gas station. Perhaps because her free time is dedicated to doing some sport or traditional dancing with the La Palma folkloric group. Now she has again the challenge of forming a government. She dreams of making Cartagena “a great tourist capital in the Mediterranean.”
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