Last demonstration of the police justice (Jupol) against the government, which took place in Madrid on May 6th. FERNANDO VILLAR (EFE)
National Police union elections held this Wednesday, calling for nearly 72,000 officers, have produced results that represent a major setback for the previous majority organization, Police Justice (Jupol), which has lost half of the eight representatives it intends to hold four years for the Police Council, the joint bargaining body between the agents and the Home Office, despite forming a coalition with another union, the Police Union Alternative. After learning of the test, which left it with just four candidates elected, the union issued a statement accusing Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska of “dirty play and cheating” for their poor results and announcing that they were “stating their union line “ will be maintained of vengeful actions”.
Founded in April 2018 under the protection of the Jusapol platform, which a year earlier promoted mobilizations demanding equal pay with the Mossos d’Esquadra, Jupol has continued the offensive against the government with massive demonstrations in recent years Streets led were supported by PP, Vox and Ciudadanos. Without the counting of mail-in ballots, Jupol loses its previous majority and the Unified Police Union (SUP), which gained two MPs compared to 2019 results when it received two, equals that majority.
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According to union sources, several factors are responsible for the failure of Jupol. The first is a schism led by Natan Espinosa, the agent who originally ran the Yusapol platform. After a fierce confrontation with the current leadership of Jupol, which even prompted him to run for leadership of the union in an extraordinary, controversial congress, Espinosa founded a new organization, Equiparación Ya (EYA), which received 3,798 votes and one representative . .
These sources point to the economic scandals surrounding Jupol’s leaders, which led to the sacking of their then secretary-general, José María García, in June 2021 for allegedly debiting the organization’s accounts for allegedly unjustified expenses such as clothing, medicines and other personal purchases. It was recently announced the opening of an investigation into the alleged use of bank cards by various current Jupol leaders, which is still being investigated in a court in Madrid.
Also influential was the sharp drop in turnout at the base scale, which comprises the vast majority of the group at 59,000 representatives and where Jupol won six representatives four years ago and then received more than 26,000 votes out of nearly 41,000 votes cast. On that occasion, just over half of police officers chose this scale, while the percentage that did so was 73.5% in 2019. Jupol now has to settle for just over 13,000 votes, less than half what it was four years ago and a far cry from the 25,000 members it claims to have.
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As a final factor in the decline, the sources consulted consistently point to the politicization of the union’s image due to the open support its demonstrations have received from right-wing parties, and Vox in particular, over the years. This was also helped by the presence of Samuel Vázquez in his candidacy, a policeman who tried to run for the city council of Fuenlabrada (Madrid, 190,000 inhabitants) on the list of Santiago Abascal’s party in the municipal elections of May 28, but who Eventually he was not able to do this as he did not get permission from the Interior Ministry due to the sanction. Vázquez, who is a member of ASP, the union for which Jupol ran as a candidate, will be exactly one of his four coalition representatives on the new council.
The union’s disintegration had been evident for months, when its street demonstrations against the reform of the citizen protection law – the so-called gag law – and later for job improvements suffered a sharp drop in participants. This is how Jupol managed to gather 20,000 people in the center of Madrid at the first protest rally on November 21, 2021. According to the government delegation, on the second of March last year there were only 4,000, a fifth. At the last one, in May, in this case to call for improvements in agent retirements, numbers recovered to 7,500 participants, still far from those of 2021. Despite this, the union campaigned to blame the perceived success of having thwarted gag law reform, but in reality it was dissension among left-wing parties in Congress that led to the failure to change the norm.
The results show that Jupol is the major and only union to lose in these elections, in which agents choose their representation at the different levels into which the National Police is divided. In fact, the rest of the organizations have improved their data, or at least maintained it. Thus, the SUP snatched from Jupol one representative at senior management level and another at sub-inspection, in addition to the two it had at base. The Spanish Police Confederation (CEP) has also improved, going from one to two representatives in the base scale, where EYA, Jupol’s department, gets its sole representative. The professional police union (SPP) has retained its two levels of leadership (the executive and the supervisor), while the federal police union retains its level of leadership at the grassroots level.