The president of the PP of Extremadura, María Guardiola, and the Vox spokesman in the Assembly of Extremadura, Ángel Pelayo Gordillo, during the signing of the government agreement last June. Jorge Armestar (Europa Press)
There are phrases that turn a government on its head. Everything happened in less than 24 hours. To understand María Guardiola’s final movements in Extremadura, one must travel to the day of her investiture. On this morning of July 14, the first president of this region of more than a million inhabitants gave a 70-minute speech, barely mentioning Vox, her government partner to whom she owes her presidential seat and of which she was a member. He gave advice to the Executive Council , despite having sworn to the press and Extremaduran voters just ten days earlier that he would never do so:
– I won’t give any advice. We will go to elections when we have to go.
No member of the PP, neither regional nor national, had shown such strong opposition to Vox. Guardiola was convinced that there would be a repeat election in Extremadura. And a week later he signed the government agreement with the extreme right and handed over to Santiago Abascal’s emissaries in Mérida a newly created department: Forest Management and the Rural World. Knowing that he had broken his word and that this sentence against Vox will be a thorn in the side of his entire term in office, during his inauguration speech he obliquely quoted a sentence by the journalist Manuel Chaves Nogales from his book about the bullfighter Juan Belmonte, who white? If so, by the way, the reason: “I always say something uncomfortable on big occasions.”
Guardiola celebrated exactly on this Thursday. It has been 60 days since the first coalition government took office in Extremadura. And after two months in which she barely granted interviews – her words against Vox in June sparked significant internal criticism over her excessive media presence, especially at the national level – the president finally spoke to the region’s two newspapers, El Periódico. Extremadura and the newspaper Hoy. In it she was asked about her relationship with Vox, her government partner, since she hardly remembers him in her speeches since July last year. “My relationship with Vox,” he noted, “is little or non-existent at the moment because I am focused on the work, the management and the launch of this very large machine.” Guardiola has just had his relationship with Vox again and with it turned his government upside down.
The statements were so well received that they reached the Congress of Deputies. “He has to remedy the situation, or he will have a very weak government, or he may have no government,” threatened Pepa Millán, Vox’s new spokeswoman in Congress. The first coalition government in Extremadura was in check. Millán set the pace of Vox in Extremadura, which had not yet spoken out. The region’s spokesman and leader, Ángel Pelayo Gordillo, called the press two hours after his colleague’s intervention in Madrid. Vox in Extremadura always follows the guidelines of the party in the capital, it has little autonomy. So much so that the investiture agreement between Guardiola and Gordillo was signed precisely at the request of Santiago Abascal’s training in a Madrid office.
The answer from Vox
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“These are not accurate statements,” Gordillo said during his appearance before the media in Mérida this Thursday. “Vox deserves the respect that voters in Extremadura give it.” And although she initially lowered her partner’s tone in Madrid, she demanded a correction:
“If Ms. Guardiola corrects her words, which I am sure she will do, there is for now no risk of the government questioning itself.”
– Do you request a correction?
-Naturally. A very simple fix. Maybe they were thoughtless statements, because everyone has a bad time.
It was not the first time that Gordillo accused Guardiola of his emptiness towards Vox. “I noticed a glaring gap in your speech,” he told him during the investiture speech. “He barely mentioned the agreement he signed with us.” Two months later it happened again. Now, 24 hours after the controversial interview, Guardiola is silent. He did not remedy the situation, although he was able to do so this Thursday at an awards ceremony related to tourism in Cáceres.
The one who did this was the PP spokesman in Parliament, José Ángel Sánchez, who tried to calm his partner’s situation but without apologizing, let alone making corrections. “It is a sterile controversy sparked by a misinterpreted headline. There is normality, there is calm, there is calm.” Vox sources in Extremadura assure that there will be no further statements for the time being. And sources from the Extremaduran PP refer to the statements of their spokesman in Mérida. “We have turned the tide. We are a united and loyal government,” they say. However, the first crisis of PP and Vox has not yet been overcome. Guardiola remains steadfast in his silence. In addition, this Friday he continued his agenda and received the mayor of Zafra in his office in Mérida. But there is no trace of the apology that he made in his investiture speech at Vox.
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