The controversies of the leader of Vox in Castilla y León compromise the PP of Mañueco

The media and political earthquakes caused by those responsible for Vox before a microphone or on Twitter generate replicas that shake their partner in the Government of Castilla y León, the PP. The aggressive style of Juan García-Gallardo, regional vice president for the far-right party, breaks the slow strategy of his conservative partner, the popular Alfonso Fernández Mañueco. This, in the line of the national PP of Alberto Núñez Feijóo, turns to charge against the central Executive, but sees how on his right he is overtaken by a Vox that rides the outburst.

Gallardo’s recent record of attacks cracks the speech of the institutional deputy secretary of the PP, Esteban González Pons, who has argued this Monday on Onda Cero that his formation has managed to “moderate” those of Santiago Abascal by including them in the Government of Castilla y León and has highlighted that it is the popular ones who mark regional politics. These words come three days after Gallardo referred to La Sexta, before the microphones of the television network, in these terms: “It is a medium aimed at contaminating coexistence and pitting some Spaniards against others.” Likewise, he urged the reporter who was interviewing him to take “a sausage” to Greater Wyoming, alluding to a tax penalty that the presenter received in 2020. “We are here to manage and do politics, Castilians and Leonese are not interested in sterile controversies,” Gallardo boasted, the cause of a good part of these “sterile controversies”, such as when he argued that depopulation was due in part to hypersexualization.

García-Gallardo also expresses himself on his Twitter wall, where he persists in denying the existence of sexist violence even in cases such as the one that occurred in Palencia last week, when a 32-year-old woman was murdered by her 36-year-old partner, leaving two orphaned children. The politician defined the events as a “family tragedy”, insisted that “violence has no gender” and assured that “soon all victims of violence will be treated equally and discriminatory identity policies based on sex will not be fed”.

The secretary of the autonomous PP, Francisco Vázquez, separated himself from that line: “There are many political forces that think different things. There is freedom of expression, but we do not share those expressions,” he said. Mañueco, the only regional president allied with Vox, has not commented on this, something recurrent since he agreed with this party. The Minister of Family of Castilla y León, Isabel Blanco (PP), did call it a “macho murder” and called for “continue fighting against the scourge of gender violence.” One of Vox’s demands to agree with Mañueco, which he accepted, was to promote a “domestic violence law”, already in the pipeline, although the president insists that it will not imply setbacks in Equality. Only three of the 12 top officials in the coalition are women.

Gallardo has also exhibited his tone in parliament. In the last plenary session he called his predecessor, Francisco Igea (Citizens), an “imbecile”. The president of the Cortes, Carlos Pollán (Vox), did not reprimand his partner. Igea, in turn, has threatened to denounce Pollán for “defamation”, because despite his position as parliamentary referee, he redistributed offensive content against the former vice president on Twitter. García-Gallardo, who does not direct any ministry, already raised angry protests on his first date in the hemicycle, when he snapped at Noelia Frutos, a socialist prosecutor with a disability, that he would speak to her “as if she were a person like another any”. The PP saved the Vox leader from being disapproved for that episode.

According to a PP source, the recurrent disturbances of Mañueco’s partner cause a contradictory effect on Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s: at the regional level they harm because “people on the right see a government with that level as disastrous”, but at the national level ” they reinforce because Vox loses prestige as an alternative”. “Vox has disappointed because the seams have been seen,” says this leader.