Zapatero defends Irene Montero in the PSOE Equality Awards: “Pride of the cashiers and all the workers”

The former president of the Government, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, has taken advantage of his first intervention during the Federal Congress of the PSOE that is being held this weekend in Seville to defend the leader of Podemos and former Minister of Equality, Irene Montero, from sexist attacks and classism launched this week by Judge Eloy Velasco, who despised the current MEP as a “Mercadona cashier.”

“The other day a judge told Irene Montero that…”, recalled Zapatero, who maintains a close dialogue and a relationship of mutual respect with the former minister, before claiming: “Well, a lot of pride for the Mercadona cashiers and of all the workers,” she said to the applause of a socialist audience full of feminist activists, some of them very critical of the role played by Montero at the head of Equality during the last legislature.

The judge of the National Court Eloy Velasco charged against Podemos and against the former Minister of Equality Irene Montero during a conference for what is known as the ‘only yes means yes’ law, approved in 2022. “They tried to explain to us what consent means… To a jurist, who we have been following since Roman law, knowing what consent is (…) and a thousand other things that Irene Montero will never learn from her Mercadona cashier,” Velasco stated.

Zapatero has also criticized the insult that a Vox Deputy launched this week in Congress at the Podemos deputy, Martina Velarde, to whom he told her to take “a pill” after speaking in plenary. “This pill…this is what the extreme right is. How pitiful, what cowardice! We have to defend all women from these humiliations,” she cried.

In the middle of his speech when collecting the Rosa Manzano award with which he has been honored by his party after his legislative legacy with laws such as that on gender violence or equal marriage (the historical Sevillian socialist Amparo Rubiales has also been recognized) , the former president has invited those present to observe a minute of silence for the DANA victims at exactly eleven minutes past eight in the afternoon, the time the tragedy began in Valencia just a month ago. After the minute of silence, some of the attendees shouted “Mazón resign.”

Zapatero has continued his speech to defend feminism as “the best thing that has happened to democracies, to Spain, to the history of civilization. “Feminism gives meaning to struggles,” she claimed to recognize “those women who left their mark on this country.”

At that moment, the former president recalled a 90-year-old feminist activist from Huelva. “He gave us a lesson,” she said in reference to her intervention in another PSOE feminist event in which she denounced “the suffering of machismo also on the left,” she mentioned in a veiled reference to the recent Íñigo Errejón scandal.