The ups and downs that the right-wing extremist party Vox has been going through within its group in the Balearic Islands for weeks received a new chapter this Thursday with the departure of the Minorcan MP Xisco Cardona from the party as a non-attached deputy. “I showed loyalty to the party by fulfilling everything the party asked of me, and that was nothing other than compliance with the investiture agreement. Since I see myself in this loyalty, I was paid with disloyalty,” said Cardona this Thursday in front of the doors of the regional parliament. Cardona was in favor of supporting the spending cap proposed by the PP in the regional parliament to start drawing up the budgets and, according to him, for this they had “very precise and very specific instructions” from the national leadership. Until an internal rebellion by several MPs with a numerical majority forced the entire eight-member group to vote against and block the regional accounts, triggering a crisis with their PP partners. “My personal dignity and that of my family are paramount in this farce,” he said.
Cardona’s departure leaves Vox with seven deputies in the Balearic Chamber and a weaker position in negotiations with the PP, but this does not change the game of parliamentary majorities, since the formation led by the conservative Marga Prohens would need four more deputies have the absolute majority. The PP governs the Balearic Islands after reaching a legislative agreement with Vox that provides for the application of 110 measures and contains a large part of the postulates of the Ultra formation, which agreed to support the population in its parliamentary initiatives, but none to bear government responsibility. . General measures which, as in the case of the implementation of free language choice, do not foresee any specific development in the agreement.
The crisis at Vox Baleares broke out during the plenary session of the Autonomous Chamber on October 17th with the debate on a non-legal proposal in which they proposed the application of free choice of language in the education system for children and young people. primary school during the next academic year and for all levels of education in 2025. The PP abstained from the vote, claiming that its refusal to give the proposal a green light does not violate the government agreement in which there is a commitment for the implementation of free elections there is language throughout the legislative period, but without specifying a specific calendar. The matter remained a reproach from the Vox MPs to their partners until hours later when the autonomous chamber debated the approval of the spending cap for the 2023 Community budget, an essential previous step to be able to prepare the draft bill. The surprise for the PP was the vote against their allies, who, in the mouth of MP Patricia de Las Heras, accused them of having had the opportunity to vote for the free choice of language proposal.
The surprise also came to some Vox MPs who, as Cardona explained, were forced to vote against the spending cap despite orders from the leadership in Madrid. In the afternoon, before the vote, there was an internal rebellion among the group of Vox deputies, which included parliamentary speaker Idoia Ribas, to block the PP accounts. A group of MPs who were the majority compared to those who wanted to listen to the national leadership. “We had instructions to enforce the free choice of language, but as stipulated in the government agreement signed between PP and Vox. “We had very precise and very specific instructions to approve this spending cap, just as we knew that the implementation of free language choice had to be gradual, before the end of the legislative period,” explained Cardona.
As the hours passed, it became clear that the dissidents of the internal rebellion would not escape unscathed. After winning the hard-line vote of the MPs, the consequences for the wayward Cardona were not long in coming, and the next day he was removed from his post as deputy speaker in Parliament and replaced by MP Sergio Rodríguez, who represented Ribas is close and a supporter. to block the proposal to cap PP spending. According to Cardona, the party publicly justified this by saying that it had spoken to members of other parties in the Autonomous Chamber, including the current Prime Minister Marga Prohens. “In exercising my constitutionally protected right to political representation, any member of the legislature speaks to any other representative at the seat of the legislature, without the need for authorization,” Cardona stressed. A few days later, his drift was also physically visible when Vox rearranged the seats in the group and banished Cardona to a corner of the chamber.
Meanwhile, the PP was stunned by the crisis of its government partner, the budgets were in the air and endured the sharp accusations of its MPs, who repeatedly accused the Prohens government in the plenary session last Tuesday of not adhering to the agreement of the legislature and that they would be “afraid of the independence unions” when applying the measure. Cardona today defended the agreement signed with the PP, stressing that not everything can be done in 24 hours. “We have all had the experience of the integrated language treatment promoted by José Ramón Bauzá, how they tried to implement it in 24 hours and it was a real failure. But it seems that some are in too much of a hurry and this has led us to an extreme situation that I do not want to face.”
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Although Vox has repeatedly denied the existence of a crisis these days, last week, just a day after the internal rebellion and the clash with the PP, the party announced the visit of the Secretary General Ignacio Garriga, who eventually canceled the meeting with the MPs of the Balearic Islands claim a flight cancellation. A visit aimed at obtaining explanations for the rejection of the party’s guidelines. Finally, this Wednesday, Garriga met in Barcelona with the Speaker of the Parliament, Idoia Ribas, and two other MPs to discuss the situation. At a meeting, the national leadership decided to join forces with the hard wing, which is in the majority and now has the support of Madrid, to maintain its resistance to the Prohens government until an agreement is reached on the application of free language choice.
“I felt helpless before the national leadership, the only thing I did was follow the party’s guidelines,” Cardona said this morning. Sources close to Vox claim that the national leadership has “completely” lost control of the Balearic Islands’ free MPs.
The General Directorate’s maneuver left Cardona in the minority, although he claims that there are members of the group who think like him. “I can’t tell you whether anyone else will follow my path, they’ll have to decide for themselves,” he said. Yesterday afternoon, Vox Baleares sent a call from the Minorcan MP to attend a press conference, although the party assured that it had not sent it. The chapter ended early in the morning with the announcement of the deputy’s departure and the question of whether he will join the ranks of the PP in the future.
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