Vox has been warning for months that it will not give in at all by demanding respect for the agreements it has made with the People’s Party to form coalition governments. He demonstrated it this summer with the departure of the regional governments of which he was a part and this Friday he took this impulse to the local level, voting against the budgets of the Burgos town hall and causing the dissolution of the government team common.
The reason for discord has been the subsidies to NGOs dedicated to assisting irregular immigrants, the same problem that caused the autonomous rupture a few months ago and that Vox marked as a red line in its roadmap. Sources from Santiago Abascal’s leadership explained to ABC that the case of Burgos may or may not be repeated in other municipalities. “This will only happen where the PP does not respect the pact,” summarizes Bambú Street. Furthermore, Vox insists that it is not them who break the governments, but it is the PP who “forces” them to leave or “expels” them.
The truth is that this Friday, after the fall in municipal budgets, the mayor of Burgos, Cristina Ayala, immediately announced that she was going to reshape the government team and her desire to continue leading the council in minority, with eleven councilors, one less than the PSOE, which won in the municipal elections. He also announced that he would submit to a question of confidence on Thursday, November 28, with which he seeks to be able to automatically approve municipal accounts.
The origin of the rupture lies in an allocation of 119,000 euros intended for agreements with three NGOs helping immigrants. Although PP and Vox agreed to remove it, the mayor decided to backtrack and include it again in the 250 million euro budget. He claimed to have received a message to this effect from Burgosian society, in the form of a concentration of several thousand people and numerous calls and observations from different sectors of the city.
Already on Tuesday, in the Finance Commission, Vox tried unsuccessfully to introduce an amendment, which it then proposed as a complement to the agreement of the two parties to govern in Burgos. He demanded that NGOs be obliged to dedicate all municipal funds exclusively to legal or regular immigrants.
Again this Friday, during the municipal plenary session, the spokesperson for Vox, Fernando Martínez-Acitores, asked his government partner at the time to admit his proposal because “it is only a question of respecting the law and It can’t bother anyone.” The current vice-mayor assured that not admitting it was tantamount to expelling them and he stressed that in recent days he has received “very hard blows” from the Popular Party, to whom he blames the break in correcting a budget that both parties had agreed on.
On the PP side, the vision of what happened is very different. Its municipal spokesperson, Andrea Ballesteros, assured in plenary session that what Vox wanted to do was “change the rules of the game in the middle of the game”. He also underlined the “legal and moral obligation” of the Town Hall to serve all the inhabitants of the municipality, regardless of their place of origin.
The attempt of the socialist spokesperson, Daniel de la Rosa, to offer specific agreements to the government of Cristina Ayala in exchange, in addition to his break with Vox, for the destination of the investments, the rest being agreed equally between the two parties , also did not prosper from the Treasury.
He recommended that the councilor accept his proposal and avoid the “bad drink” of submitting and, predictably, losing a matter of trust that would allow her to approve budgets thirty days later. Ayala refused because so far in his mandate “they have systematically opposed everything that the government team has proposed” and he even accused them of having gone so far as to insult them, internally and abroad. outside the plenary room,
After the rejection of the Accounts, having only the favorable vote of the PP councilors, the mayor personally thanked each of the Vox councilors for the work carried out during the first year and a half of the legislature as “a unique team”. “On certain issues there have been insurmountable differences, which have always had immigration as the protagonist and which, unfortunately, lead us to break the pact.”
The mayor also did not wait to announce her next approach to finally approve the accounts. It will be subject to a question of confidence on the 28th. Even if he loses it – as could happen given the current differences with Vox – the automatic approval of the Budget would practically be a fact that could only be avoided by an agreement – almost impossible between those of Abascal and the PSOE to present a motion of censure and support a candidate of one party or another at the head of the council.
