The plenary sessions of the Madrid City Council have something of a déjà vu. The city councilor and spokesman for Vox Javier Ortega Smith was abandoned this Thursday by the PP, the PSOE and Más Madrid, who have also asked him to deposit his record as a councilor in the plenary session and as a deputy of Congress for throwing bottles at Más Madrid City Councilor Eduardo Fernández Rubiño in the plenary session on December 22nd. Ortega-Smith, together with the councilors of his party, left the room where the extraordinary plenary session called by the mayor José Luis Martínez Almeida took place. Minutes later, he told the press: “I don't care at all.” The Vox city council recalled that this was not the first time this had happened.
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Already in 2019, the PSOE, Ciudadanos and Más Madrid abandoned him because of his denial speech against sexist violence at the institutional event for the Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. In November 2019, the city council said the same words after the plenary session: “Let’s say I don’t care.” Three years later, Ortega Smith remains a city councilor.
In the plenary session this Thursday, he assured, as he did in the plenary hall in 2019, that Vox was the victim. He has denied that the episode with the bottle and the “Now, scream” that he addressed to Fernández Rubiño were an attack. “The only aggression is what you did to the victims of the infamous pact in Pamplona,” said the Vox city councilor addressed to the Más Madrid city council. He then concluded: “The only good thing Mr. Rubiño did is that he said there was no physical aggression and left his speaker with her breasts in the air.” [refiriéndose a Rita Maestre en un juego de palabras sobre la causa judicial en la que esta fue absuelta por irrumpir en la capilla de la Complutense sin la parte de arriba de la ropa en 2011]“.
The Ultra MP has also argued that Vox left the meeting because he was not granted an answer. “We are going to cancel this plenary session because I have no interest whatsoever in listening to you because you don’t want to listen to me,” he said before leaving with the other four councilors from his party.
During the plenary session, Más Madrid spokesperson Rita Maestre assured that Ortega Smith's attack was not an anomaly, “but Vox's method”, reminding her of other attacks by far-right supporters on members of the LGTBI community. In a short post, Fernández Rubiño described Vox as “a small minority.”
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“The violent use violence because they lack ideas,” said the deputy spokesman for Más Madrid. PSOE spokesman Reyes Maroto has accused the far right of being “a cancer” on democratic quality. In his response, he told the PP: “We are very proud that the government has a president named Pedro Sánchez. What was the alternative? That this councilor we are abandoning today was a minister of the Spanish government?”
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In any case, this Thursday Ortega Smith ordered the complete break between Vox and the Madrid PP. However, he assured that other key agreements with the people's representatives supporting them in regional and local governments will be maintained. He has attacked the left-wing parties, which he calls the “coup PSOE” and “Hamas Madrid”, accusing them of putting up “smokescreens” to distract Madrid residents from the alliances with Bildu in Pamplona. “I have the feeling that the PP is joining this theater, this farce of condemnation, and that it is doing so hand in hand with those who stand hand in hand with the Bilduetarras, the communists and the coup plotters,” he said previously . Leaving the Cibeles Palace.
Almeida, who spoke in the last round of the plenary session, called the Ultra representative a “coward” for leaving the session. “So big and so cowardly,” said the mayor, who also claimed to have been a direct witness and to have noticed “from the first moment the severity” of the blow that Ortega gave Smith to the bottle and how he was against the city council thrown by Más Madrid.
The mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez Almeida, listens to the intervention of the Vox spokesman Javier Ortega Smith during the extraordinary meeting this Thursday.Claudio Álvarez
The vote was decided in just a few seconds. Although the PP had requested a point vote in plenary, the Left refused and in the end decided on a joint vote on all points: disapproval, waiver of the city council member's file and the deputy's file. The People's Party had confirmed in recent days that it would vote for the first two points, but not the last. The deputy mayor of Madrid, Inma Sanz, had said that the MP's record was something that should be discussed in another area. Both Maestre and Maroto expressed their satisfaction at the end of the plenary session, which lasted just over an hour.
In front of the Cibeles Palace on Montalbán Street, around 50 Vox supporters cheered the city council, waved flags of Spain and the Ultra party and launched proclamations against the mayor of Madrid. “Almeida resignation, neither forgetting nor forgiveness”, “Almeida, brave, brave son of a bitch”, “PSOE, PP the same shit”, “Javier, brave. “Spain defends itself” were some of the shouts that could be heard around the town hall.
Vox supporters, this Thursday, during the plenary session of disapproval of Javier Ortega Smith.Claudio Álvarez
Incidentally, there is also a bit of smoke at the city council's plenary meetings. This Thursday, the political groups accused each other of using smokescreens to distract citizens from various issues. After briefly disapproving of Ortega Smith, Madrid's deputy mayor turned most of her speech to the left. “It will not distract us from what is important and the attack on the rule of law,” he said, referring to the agreement between the PSOE and EH Bildu in Pamplona, which appointed Joseba Asiron mayor.
Almeida threw his darts in the same place. “Neither Mr. Ortega wants to leave the City Council’s file, nor does the Left want to,” declared the mayor, addressing the PSOE: “The existence of Vox is great for you to cover up your pacts of shame.”
Ortega Smith also spoke about smoke in the plenary session. He assured that his disapproval was a pretext with which the left “is trying to cover up the shame of what happened in Pamplona”. But he has not forgotten the popular ones and also criticized Alberto Núñez Feijóo for the pacts “with the coup leader Sánchez” to release the General Council of Justice.
And as in all plenary sessions, the conversation was ultimately more national than local. Almeida did not miss the opportunity: “You know that the future of a better Spain lies in the PP. Vox and you are approaching a common enemy.”
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