The plenary sessions of the Madrid City Council have something of deja vu. The councilor and spokesperson for Vox Javier Ortega Smith has been failed this Thursday by the PP, the PSOE and Más Madrid, who have also asked him to leave his record as a councilor in the plenary session and as a deputy of Congress for throwing a bottle at Más Madrid councilor Eduardo Fernández Rubiño in the plenary session on December 22. Ortega-Smith has left, along with the councilors of his party, the chamber where the extraordinary plenary session called by the mayor, José Luis Martínez Almeida, was being held. Minutes later he declared to the press: “I don't give a damn.” The Vox councilor recalled that this is not the first time this has happened.
In 2019, the PSOE, Ciudadanos and Más Madrid already failed him for his denialist speech against sexist violence at the institutional event for the Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. That November 2019, after the plenary session, the councilor said those same words: “Let's say I don't give a damn.” Three years later, Ortega Smith remains as a councilor.
In the plenary session this Thursday, as he did in 2019, he assured in the chamber that Vox is the victim. He has denied that the episode with the bottle and that the “now, cry” that he directed at Fernández Rubiño were an attack. “The only aggression is what you,” said the Vox councilor, addressing the Más Madrid councilor, “did to the victims for the infamous pact in Pamplona.” Then, he concluded: “The only good thing that Mr. Rubiño did is that he said that there had been no physical aggression, leaving his spokesperson with her breasts in the air. [refiriéndose a Rita Maestre en un juego de palabras sobre la causa judicial en la que esta fue absuelta por irrumpir en la capilla de la Complutense sin la parte de arriba de la ropa en 2011]”.
The ultra deputy has also argued for Vox's departure from the session because he had not been granted a reply. “We will abandon this plenary session because I am not in the least interested in listening to you because you do not want to listen to me,” he said before leaving with the other four councilors of his party.
During the plenary session, the spokesperson for Más Madrid, Rita Maestre, assured that Ortega Smith's attack is not an anomaly, “but rather Vox's method” and reminded her of other attacks by far-right followers on members of the LGTBI community. . Fernández Rubiño, in a short intervention, described Vox as “a small minority.”
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“The violent use force, because what they lack are ideas,” stated the deputy spokesperson for Más Madrid. The PSOE spokesperson, Reyes Maroto, has accused the extreme right of being “a cancer” on democratic quality. During the reply, she told the PP: “We are very proud that the Government has a president named Pedro Sánchez. What was the alternative? That this councilor that we are failing today was a minister of the Government of Spain?”
In any case, Ortega Smith decreed this Thursday the complete break between Vox and the Madrid PP. However, he has assured that other essential agreements with the popular people, whom they support in regional and municipal governments, will be maintained. He has attacked the left-wing parties, which he has referred to as the “coup PSOE” and “Hamas Madrid”, and has accused them of putting up “smoke screens” to distract Madrid residents from the pacts with Bildu in Pamplona . “I feel that the PP is joining this theater, this farce of condemnation, and that it is doing so hand in hand with those who are hand in hand (sic) with the Bilduetarras, with the communists and with the coup plotters,” he said before. leaving the Cibeles Palace.
Almeida, who spoke in the last turn of the plenary session, called the ultra representative a “coward” for having left the session. “So big and so cowardly,” said the mayor who, in addition, has claimed to have been a direct witness and to have noticed “from the first moment the seriousness” of the blow that Ortega Smith gave to the bottle and how it was thrown against the councilor of Más Madrid.
The vote was settled in just a few seconds. Although the PP has requested a vote by points of the plenary session, the left has refused and, in the end, they have opted for a joint vote of all of them: disapproval, abandonment of the councilor's record and the deputy's record. The popular party had confirmed in recent days that they would vote in favor of the first two points, but not the last one. The vice mayor of Madrid, Inma Sanz, had said that the deputy's record was something that should be discussed in another area. Both Maestre and Maroto expressed their satisfaction at the end of the plenary session, which lasted just over an hour.
Outside the Cibeles Palace, on Montalbán Street, around 50 Vox supporters cheered the councillor, waved flags of Spain and the ultra party and launched proclamations against the mayor of Madrid. “Almeida resignation, neither forgetting nor forgiveness”, “Almeida, brave, brave son of a bitch”, “PSOE, PP the same shit”, “Javier, brave. Spain defends itself” have been some of the chants that have been heard around the City Hall headquarters.
For the rest, the City Council plenary sessions also have a bit of smoke. This Thursday, political groups have accused each other of launching smoke screens to distract citizens from different issues. The vice mayor of Madrid, after briefly disappr
oving of Ortega Smith, directed most of her speech to the left. “She is not going to distract us from what is important and from the attack against the rule of law,” she said, in reference to the agreement between the PSOE and EH Bildu in Pamplona that has made Joseba Asiron mayor.
Almeida has thrown his darts at the same point. “Neither Mr. Ortega wants to leave the councilor's record nor does the left want it,” the mayor stated and addressed the PSOE: “The existence of Vox is great for you to cover up your pacts of shame.”
Ortega Smith has also spoken of smoke in the plenary session. He has assured that his disapproval is a smokescreen with which the left “tries to cover up the infamy of what happened in Pamplona.” But he has not forgotten the popular ones and has also criticized Alberto Núñez Feijóo for the pacts “with the Sánchez coup leader” to unblock the General Council of the Judiciary.
And, as happens in all plenary sessions, the conversation has ended up being more national than local. Almeida has not missed the opportunity: “You know that the future of a better Spain is the PP. Vox and you converge towards a common enemy.”
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