Carlos Mazón, 49, was elected President of the Generalitat this Thursday in the Valencian Parliament with 53 votes in favor and 46 against. He was backed by the 40 MPs from his party, the PP, and the 13 from Vox, with whom he will govern in a coalition. And the 31 representatives of the socialists and the 15 of the compromises spoke out against it. In this way, Mazón becomes the seventh Valencian president of the autonomous democratic stage, after Joan Lerma, Eduardo Zaplana, José Luis Olivas, Francisco Camps, Alberto Fabra and Ximo Puig (the first and last of the PSPV-PSOE; the others of the PP). Once the agreement has been communicated to the King and the Government President and published in the BOE, a plenary session for the institutional declaration and oath of office or promise of office will be convened next Monday 17 July.
Mazón delivered an inaugural address full of calls for “dialogue,” “meeting places,” “outstretched hands,” “tolerance,” and “respect,” but wanted to make it clear right from the start that he was “sincere.” Thank you to the 13th Representatives of the Vox Group in these courts. The leader of the MPs has taken countervailing measures to combat some of the criticism of his concessions to Santiago Abascal’s speech – he will include equality policies in a vice presidency and has used the term macho violence – without bothering his partner too much. He has tried to water down his pact with Vox, likening it to an agreement with Compromís for the Cortes table and to other movements.
In his speech he emphasized the improvement of health, with the “dignity of health workers”, and education, “without ideologies” and with the “free choice of center and language” as priorities of his government program. And he reiterated the measures announced in the pact with the extreme right, whose bench has garnered most of the people’s deputies’ applause. On the contrary: the subsequent intervention by Vox spokeswoman Ana Vega hardly received any applause in the ranks of the PP.
There was a striking discrepancy when Mazón said in his speech: “I want to make a special mention of one of society’s greatest scourges: sexist violence.” Vox denies sexist and gender-based violence and is forced to ignore it and, in the pact between both formations, the expression to use “domestic violence”. And after rejecting “any type of violence that occurs in any workplace, be it sexist, domestic, gender or sexual identity, racist or of any kind,” Mazón has announced so “Equality will have the rank of vice presidency in his future administration.” Then Volksbank burst into applause while the majority of Vox MPs didn’t move a hair. The vice presidency, which will be held by former Vox bullfighter and businessman Vicente Barrera, will be responsible for cultural powers.
In the other announcements, there was complete agreement between the two right-wing parties, such as when Mazón said he would abolish inheritance and gift taxes, reduce the regional part of income tax to everyone, or immediately abolish the tourist tax, the application of which is in the hands of municipalities . There was also a fluke in the clacking of the right-wing judges’ bench when they reiterated their intention to scrap language requirements in the health sector, although knowledge of Valencian is only a merit that scores, not an obligation.
However, the moment of greatest community, at least due to the heavy applause, was when Mazón stressed that “the government of change will cancel any aid to those who the Catalan countries want to impose on us”. He said this after announcing the adoption of a “new law on the identity of the people of the Valencian Community” and a day after learning that a Vox councilor had vetoed the subscription to five magazines written in Catalan, two of them for children, had lodged the municipality of Burriana in Castellón. Curiously, Mazón delivered a small portion of his speech in normative Valencian, using, for example, the usual formal register amplified forms such as “aquest”, but was reviled and stigmatized by anti-Catalanism, which regards Valencian and Catalan as distinct languages from which the traditionally fed the Valencian right.
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Ximo Puig, in Parliament this Thursday after requesting a minute’s silence over the murder of a woman in Antella by her ex-partner. Robert Solsona (Europa Press)
Socialist Ximo Puig began his speech by mentioning the assassination of Miguel Ángel Blanco, but stressed that ETA’s terrorism has ended and the terrorism that must be fought is now sexist terrorism, and he has ordered another minute’s silence to commemorate Women were murdered last week, one of them in the Valencian municipality of Antella. The entire chamber, including the Vox MPs, has followed him, just as he had previously done with the protocol for the murdered popular mayor that Mazón had requested.
The socialist leader has listed endless questions about the future autonomous coalition government with Vox and what Valencians will ask themselves: “What will happen to abused women, to free culture, to coexistence?” Will the co-payments return, will the parents’ veto be implemented, will cornered the Valencian language in schools and institutions, will they privatize healthcare again, limit education, will they manipulate public radio and television in Valencia?” began the Socialist, who resigned this Thursday after eight years in office approved by the Presidency of the Generalitat.
The PSPV chief has defended his government’s leadership despite the hard times brought on by the pandemic and war in Ukraine. “I hope we don’t see a National Shotgun remake on the news every day,” he asked, referring to Luis García Berlanga’s satirical film. “How far will he go, what will his parliamentary majority cost?” Puig Mazón snapped. According to the former president, the PP and Vox pact “takes away not legitimacy, but dignity,” and he has subsequently offered pacts to expand sexist violence policies; of democratic quality, a pact for energy and reindustrialization, for the welfare state and for Valencian culture. “He will always rely on this group to enforce his rights and keep his composure. It’s up to you to get into centrality or settle into radicalism,” he added.
Joan Baldoví, spokesman for Compromís in the Valencian Parliament, has entered the debate on the inauguration of the President of the Generalitat with a tough speech to the PP-Vox coalition, disfiguring Carlos Mazón, who has assumed the presidency of the Valencian Parliament, the person who says that maintaining 17 regional parliaments is not expedient: “You have to have a bar.” [cara] to confirm that and then agree to take the chair of this Parliament. I sincerely hope…” added Baldoví, unable to finish the sentence because Llanos Massó, President of the Vox Chamber, interrupted him and asked him to attend the investiture speech.
Baldoví has spoken of a “hidden program” that the PP will implement, since “it will control 95% of the budget” and has asked whether it will privatize healthcare, as the PP Generalitat has already done, or how it is intended to compensate for the elimination and reduction of taxes. “The pact was as follows: the PP takes over Vox’s hate speech and forgets to talk about gender-based violence, in return leaving Vox 95% of the budget in their hands,” he stressed.
Vox spokeswoman Ana Vega thanked Mazón for his “courage that the PP didn’t have elsewhere” and for being “at the peak of the situation” and not like other national PP colleagues. He said they would be loyal partners but would demand “compliance with the entire contract” because the pact was not a blank cheque. “We will ensure that families have freedom in matters of education. We will not lower any of the flags raised so far. We defend the unity of Spain and restore the freedom of our region,” added the Ultra MP. He has announced that they are “ending the repression of Spanish in the classroom” and have spoken of the repeal of the Valencian multilingualism law, which divides students’ lessons between Spanish, Valencian and English. Mazón thanked Vega in response and I sent him a final message without elaborating: “Let’s not be a bad show.”
No national representatives of the two formations belonging to the Valencian government were present at the meeting. Neither Alberto Núñez Feijóo, president and candidate of the PP, who held a rally in Alicante on Wednesday afternoon, nor Santiago Abascal, leader of the Ultra party, who is leading an electoral rally in Valencia this afternoon, attended the plenary session, which began at ten in the morning . There are also no other representatives of either formation at the national level. The President of the Chamber of Valencia, José Vicente Morata, was standing in the guest gallery first thing in the morning; the historic head of the Valencian Farmers’ Union (AVA), Cristóbal Aguado; or, among others, the President of the Valencian Language Academy, Verónica Cantó. In the final part of the debate, Vicente Boluda, President of the Valencia Business Association (AVE), appeared just in time to embrace Mazón.
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