Vox has purged Mazaly Aguilar, one of the few historical leaders who is still in the party and its most important institutional position in the EU, since she is third vice president of the Agriculture and Rural Development Commission of the European Parliament. Santiago Abascal's party made public over the weekend the names of the first three candidates for the European elections on June 9 and among them does not include Mazaly Aguilar, who was number two on the Vox list for the Strasbourg Parliament. in 2019.
Sources from the ultra party rule out that the until now MEP is in positions four or five on the list, despite the fact that the first three designated are men - Jorge Buxadé, Hermann Tertsch and Juan Carlos Girauta - and the electoral law requires that the At least two of the top five are women. The polls also do not favor Vox, which could lose the fourth seat it won in the European Parliament after the departure of British parliamentarians due to
Brexit
.
The exclusion of Mazaly Aguilar has not caused surprise in Vox circles, since the management had marginalized her for a long time. In the speech he gave in a hotel in Madrid on January 27, after being proclaimed president of Vox for the next four years, Abascal expressly cited the other three MEPs of his party, but forgot to mention Mazaly Aguilar. When Vox held a summit in Brussels on February 14 with the European Commissioner for Agriculture, the Polish ultra-conservative Janusz Wojciechowski, the four Vox regional councilors with powers in the rural sector and representatives of agricultural associations, she was not even invited. Her initiatives are ignored on the party's social networks; and in the electoral campaigns they have stopped resorting to it, the same sources emphasize.
More information
Alejandro Fernández, in his reunion with Feijóo: “It was a delicate birth, the child came out fighting”
The ostracism to which the Vox leadership has relegated this leader is especially striking at a time when the unrest of farmers and ranchers has become one of the battlehorses of the next electoral campaign for the European Parliament. And the still MEP has privileged knowledge of the sector thanks to her responsibility in the organization.
She is also a historical leader of the group, who boasts of having Vox membership card number eight. The first president of the party, Alejo Vidal-Quadras, commissioned her to set up the Vice Secretary of Institutional Relations, taking advantage of her long experience in executive positions in companies such as Airtel-Vodafone, BBVA or Bank of America. Abascal himself appointed her vice president of Vox in 2014 and kept her in her position until 2020.
It was in June 2021 when Mazaly Aguilar fell from grace. According to party sources, the former vice president confronted Buxadé, a fellow member and new strong man of Vox, for refusing to give up control of the 60,000 euros per year that the European Parliament makes available to MEPs to finance their parliamentary and political activities. whose correct use they personally respond to. She also did not want to delegate the signature for the hiring of personnel paid with funds from the European Parliament, according to the same sources.
The fight for subsidies from the Legislative Chamber and the hiring of advisors at its expense was also the cause of the breakup of the Vox group in the Murcia Parliament in the previous legislature. The difference between one crisis and another is that, in the case of the European Parliament, the confrontation did not come to light. The Vox leadership, which took sides in favor of Buxadé, chose to marginalize the
rebellious
MEP , who has remained throughout the legislature in the discipline of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, which Vox shares with the Poles of Law and Justice or the Italians of Giorgia Meloni.
Mazaly, who joined Vox at the hands of her former spokesperson in Congress Iván Espinosa de los Monteros, was one of the last leaders related to this sector, described as liberal, who was still in the party. Before her came Espinosa himself or former deputies Víctor Sánchez del Real and Rubén Manso. For his part, Buxadé is the visible head of the most ultra-Catholic faction, led by Abascal's advisor Kiko Méndez-Monasterio. Faced with the trickle of casualties, one of the few additions to the formation has been that of Juan Carlos Girauta. The former Ciudadanos deputy was already in the orbit of the ultra party in recent years as a promoter with Denaes (Vox's predecessor foundation) of the demonstration against the October 2023 amnesty in Colón or as a teacher at the school of Marion Maréchal, former deputy. of the National Front and niece of the French far-right leader Marine Le Pen.
On the other hand, Abascal has hired two leaders for the National Executive Committee (CEN) of Vox who were eliminated by the party's Guarantees Committee in the general assembly on January 27. Initially, Abascal included Rosa Cuervas-Mons and Montserrat Lluís in his candidacy for the CEN, but the Electoral Committee (whose members are the same as the Guarantees Committee), the highest authority in matters of internal elections, disqualified them because they did not meet the requirement. to be “full” affiliates; that is, for not having been in the party for more than nine months and being up to date with the payment of dues. Now, Abascal has incorporated them into the CEN without prior notice or explanation, relying on an article in the statutes that allows him to co-opt new members to the party leadership, as long as he has the support of the majority of the members of the executive. Critical sectors of Vox consider, however, that, by amending the plan of the Electoral Committee, the leader has shown little adherence to the operating rules of his own party. The list headed by Abascal was not even put to a vote by the members, but was directly proclaimed the winner by the aforementioned committee.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
Keep reading
I am already a subscriber
_