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A few days ago. Specifically, it happened on 11 July, at around 9pm. For the first time in the short history of the Spanish Constitution of 1978, a political party announced, to the media, to its affiliates, voters and in general to all Spaniards, that it was withdrawing from a regional government due to the incompatibility of the party’s deep convictions and the “demands” of its partner in government. The party that took this decision is VOX. The party with which it had been in coalition since June 2023 was the Partido Popular. The issue, the “distribution” of illegal immigrants, supposedly minors, throughout the Spanish national territory.
Not one, but up to five governments. Practically all the media – especially those linked to Calle Génova, that is, the street in Madrid where the headquarters of the Popular Party is located – had been scorning all week the declarations of Santiago Abascal, the previous Monday, where he had indicated that if the PP presidents of the regions where there were coalition governments gave in to the pressures and threats of Pedro Sánchez to distribute throughout all the regions the thousands of illegal immigrants, supposedly minors, who are in reception centres in the Canary Islands, VOX would consider the government pacts broken and would go into parliamentary opposition.
They said, journalists and commentators, that VOX would not keep its word and that attachment to the armchairs; that is, to being part of governments, official cars, receptions and other trifles of the political class, would prevail over the defence of convictions. They scoffed. They said it was not possible. That no party could lose that important regional power (four regional vice-presidents, a dozen regional councillors, and perhaps more than 70 or 80 people serving as chiefs of staff, press, general secretaries, communication) and that VOX was bluffing.
But he kept his word. Because Feijóo, the president of the Popular Party, eager to reach agreements with the socialist party, and almost certainly encouraged by Úrsula Von der Leyen, the real leader of the European popular party – engaged in a real personal campaign to maintain power in Brussels -, had decided that the Autonomous Communities (regions) where the Popular Party governs, alone or with VOX in coalition, were going to take in hundreds of MENAS (Unaccompanied Foreign Minors) in exchange for a few thousand or millions of euros to be paid by the government of Pedro Sánchez.
VOX has rejected this from the beginning. VOX warned its partner, the PP, that it would not accept it. VOX had voted against that part of the Asylum and Immigration Pact which, in a similar model, imposes this so-called “compulsory solidarity”. Sánchez imposes in Spain the model that Merkel imposed in Brussels in that failed Dublin that has led us to the collapse of societies such as the French, German or Swedish. The Popular Party, instead of making a common front with VOX, in defence of common sense, the protection of borders, compliance with the law and the stability of public services, gave itself into the hands of the socialist and communist government.
VOX argues that these compulsory distributions masked under the expression solidarity are a call for illegal immigration and an obvious support for the business model of human trafficking mafias. And his convictions led him to break governments, to show that there is no attachment to “armchairs”.
VOX has shown that VOX can be trusted. That you can trust a generation of men and women who have decided to confront, for real, a model of “management” of immigration that has proved to be unfair, inefficient and unsupportive; as well as producing serious breaches in the safety of Spaniards in the streets and neighbourhoods of Spain; and a no less serious and dangerous saturation of public services.
The press that said VOX would not do it now jubilantly proclaims that VOX has made a mistake, has shot itself in the foot, and that the PP comes out as the winner. We shall see. The truth is that they say it so many times and with increasing violence, that one would think that not even they believe it.
We shall see if political and intellectual honesty does or does not give votes, they say. It doesn’t matter. Because VOX has already won. Honesty is always more than votes.