The former President of the Government, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, took advantage of his first intervention at the Federal Congress of the PSOE which is being held this weekend in Seville to defend the leader of Podemos and former Minister of Equality, Irene Montero, of sexist and classism attacks launched this week by judge Eloy Velasco, who scorned the current MEP by calling him a “Mercadona cashier”.
“The other day a judge told Irene Montero that…” recalled Zapatero, who maintains a close dialogue and a relationship of mutual respect with the former minister, before declaring: “Well, a lot of pride for the cashiers of Mercadona and for all the workers,” she declared to the applause of a socialist audience full of feminist activists, some of whom were very critical of the role played by Montero at the head of Equality during the last legislature.
National Court judge Eloy Velasco accused Podemos and former Equality Minister Irene Montero during a conference on the so-called “only yes means yes” law, approved in 2022. “They tried to explain to us what consent means… For a jurist that we follow since Roman law, knowing what consent is (…) and a thousand other things that Irene Montero will never learn from her cashier at Mercadona,” Velasco said.
Zapatero also criticized the insult that a Vox deputy launched this week in Congress against Podemos deputy Martina Velarde, who he told to take “a pill” after speaking in plenary. “This pill… that’s what the extreme right is all about. What pity, what cowardice! We must defend all women from these humiliations,” she shouted.
In the middle of his speech at the reception of the Rosa Manzano Prize, which was awarded to him by his party after his legislative legacy with laws such as that on gender violence or on marriage equality (the historic Sevillian socialist Amparo Rubiales was also recognized), the former president invited those present to observe a minute of silence for the victims of DANA at eight thirty precisely, the time when the tragedy began in Valencia, just one year ago month. After the minute of silence, some participants shouted “Mazón resign.”
Zapatero continued his speech to defend feminism as “the best thing that happened to democracies, to Spain, to the history of civilization.” “Feminism gives meaning to struggles,” she says, recognizing “these women who have left their mark on this country.”
At that time, the former president recalled a 90-year-old feminist activist from Huelva. “He gave us a lesson,” she said in reference to her intervention in another PSOE feminist event in which she denounced “the suffering of machismo also on the left,” she mentioned in a veiled reference to the recent Íñigo Errejón scandal.
