Right Captain José Ramón Llorca, PP candidate for Cartagena City Council, together with Antonio León, mayor of Torre-Pacheco (also in Murcia), the city where he was based.
With more than 155,000 votes for the parties, the state security is not only a catch area, but also a broad group in which candidates are being sought. According to Home Office data, to which EL PAÍS had access, six active-duty national police officers and five Civil Guards accepted offers from various political groups to stand on their lists for the May 28 local and regional elections. A seventh police officer’s request to appear was denied due to an open internal file that had not yet been resolved. These 11 candidates are significantly fewer than four years ago when 19 (15 police officers and 4 Civil Guards) presented themselves.
Among the five members of the armed institute who have now taken the step to stand as candidates, there is one officer, which was not the case in the 2019 elections: Captain José Ramón Llorca, hitherto head of the armed institute in the city of Torre-Pacheco ( Murcia). Llorca appears number two in the PP election for the Cartagena City Council (population 214,000), headed by current Mayor Noelia Arroyo. The other members of the armed institute standing as candidates in the elections are a corporal standing as a candidate in the province of Lugo and three agents drawn from the ranks of corporal and guards standing as candidates in those of Pontevedra, Murcia and Almeria. One of them, José Luis Gómez Fontenla, becomes the PP’s candidate for mayor in the Galician municipality of Moraña, which has 4,200 inhabitants.
Pedro Carmona, spokesman for the Unified Association of the Civil Guard (AUGC), believes the number of agents from the armed institute who would present themselves as candidates would be greater if the procedure for a member of the security forces – which the law requires – “Political neutrality” would be required in the exercise of their functions, which is why they are prohibited from joining parties outside “less complex” ones. According to the details, to do this they must request a transition to an administrative situation called “special services” in which they no longer receive their remuneration as agents, although they retain some rights such as the collection of triennials. However, for Agustín Leal, Judiciary spokesman for the Civil Guard (Jucil, the majority association among the agents), the reasons why there are few candidates in uniform are different: “The Civil Guard is generally not very interested in politics “. The best known so far Case of an active Civil Guard who took part in elections is that of Juan Antonio Delgado Ramos, who held a seat for United We Can in Congress from 2016 until last year, when he was elected Member of Parliament of Andalusia on behalf of the coalition Por Andalucia.
More common is the presence of active national police officers in candidacies, who also have to go to special services to do so. In fact, there are currently three members of Congress who come from this body. One is Felipe Sicilia, a socialist MP for Jaén who held the position of spokesman for the PSOE federal executive. Also in the chamber is Pablo Cambronero, a rank-and-file policeman who was elected by Ciudadanos after passing through the Andalusian Parliament in 2019, although he later left the party and is now part of the Mixed Group. Finally, the PP Ana Belén Vázquez, its spokeswoman for the Interior Commission, who has been student inspector since June 2002 after approving opposition to being admitted to the management level of the National Police, but has not yet completed the course for his political career, he has not completed the full Gained agent status, as she confirms.
In these elections, the number of active national police officers running as candidates was significantly reduced compared to the two previous local and regional elections. 16 did so in 2015 and 15 in 2019. This time only six will attend after the General Directorate of Police refused a seventh agent the leave he had requested due to an open disciplinary file. This is Samuel Vázquez, President of the Siglo XXI Police Association, who has starred in controversial public interventions linking irregular immigration and an alleged rise in crime in Spain.
Vázquez, who has denounced the Interior Ministry’s decision that prevented him from taking part in the elections, was set to become Vox number two on the city council of Fuenlabrada, a municipality south-west of Madrid of 190,000 people. According to last April’s CIS poll, Santiago Abascal’s party is exactly the one favored by the police and military group: 38.4% of this group would vote for him, compared to 21.1% who would vote for the PP would vote, and 8.7% who would vote for the PSOE.
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