matthewbennett on Nostr: Garre, Vox, drought and the regional elections A former Popular Party First Minister ...

Garre, Vox, drought and the regional elections

A former Popular Party First Minister is now running as a Vox candidate

A few years ago, Alberto Garre was a senior Popular Party politician in Murcia. He even became, for a brief one-year period, regional first minister after the previous incumbent, Valcárcel, who had been in the post for 19 years (yes, nineteen, one nine) left. Garre then went quiet for a while before reappearing in 2017-2018 with a new regional party called Somos Región (“We Are Region”). That was not a bad idea at the time, with everyone focused on the Catalan separatists and regional matters and Murcia had never really had a regional party to speak of. If it had worked in Cantabria and Galicia and Cataluña and Andalusia, why not try a more energetic regional identity down here?

Back then, somebody organised a political-media play with a large farmers protest using hundreds of tractors to collapse traffic in the city centre for two days, a kind of agricultural Occupy Wall Street thing that was nominally about fields, crops and water. Who was then acclaimed by the farmers at the end of day two, as the solution to all of their problems? Garre. Unfortunately for him, Vox began its national surge at the same time and by the time the last elections came round in 2019, ran off with all of those votes.

Farmers got their tractors out in Murcia last year too, but the political star of the show then was not Garre but…Santiago Abascal, Vox’s national leader, who if I remember rightly raced down on a motorbike from a session in parliament in Madrid earlier in the morning. So it is now interesting to note that Garre has reappeared again. The headline news is that he has now abandoned Somos Region to run as the number 3 man on the Vox list at the regional elections next month (Spain has a closed-list proportional representation electoral system, not first-past-the-post). Polls suggest Vox will take 7-8 of the 45 seats in the regional chamber, which means it is almost certain that Garre will now be elected as a regional MP…for Vox.

It is also worth noting that Garre is from a town called Torre Pacheco, which is heavily agricultural with lots of immigrant workers. Vox won the vote there at the last general election (38%). At the last regional election, the PP came first (23%), Vox came fourth (13.85%) and Garre’s Somos Región came fifth (10.57%). Ciudadanos, which is set to do terribly this year, came sixth back then on 8% of the vote. So it’s not out of the question that someone is sitting in an office somewhere adding Garre’s 10% to Vox’s 13% and musing that the 8% from Ciudadanos has to go somewhere and so that might work for Garre and Vox and they get to take the town from the PP with an experienced local bloke who goes straight in to a top regional job in a right-wing coalition goverment where he can put extra pressure on policies like farming, water and immigration. The farmers will quite like that, I imagine, and a former PP man now jumping to Vox at such a late stage might convince others too.