Vox raises his melee combat against everyone

The leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal, along with his spokesperson, Iván Espinosa de Los Monteros, and the general secretary of the group, Macarena Olona, ​​in Congress on Tuesday.JJ Guillén / EFE

There are two sentences, short, resounding and forceful, that summarize the unapologetic intentions of Vox's new strategy for this incipient political season: "There is only Vox left" and "the time has come to defend ourselves." The first is repeated daily by its leaders, no matter in what context. The second was the response on the official Twitter of the ultra formation to the scandal that broke out after the unpleasant day that took place on Tuesday in the plenary session of Congress, where one of its most eccentric deputies, judge on leave of absence, José María Sánchez García, he reached the limit of being expelled by the Presidency of the Cortes after insulting a PSOE parliamentarian by calling her a "witch".

The unusual incident could seem accidental, improvised in the heat of a sensitive debate on a legal reform to punish the harassers of the clinics where abortions are performed, but it was not, according to the increasing aggressive behavior of Vox ministers and deputies of all the other parties.

Vox has never shied away from the most unsavory dialectical confrontations. Its main speakers in the Chamber, Iván Espinosa de los Monteros, Macarena Olona, ​​Javier Ortega or the deputies Rocío Meer, Carla Toscana or Mireia Borrás even show off their hand-to-hand combat. In the case of women parliamentarians, especially to denigrate the attitudes and interventions of the leaders of the progressive government in defense of equality policies, whom they deny feminist representation and label them as “feminist” who benefit from what they call “chiringuitos de las elites of the left caviar ”.

The leader, Santiago Abascal, and his lieutenant in Congress, Espinosa de los Monteros, use their speeches and expositions to question the legitimacy of the "social-communist and filoetarra" Executive and to mock the journey of Pablo Casado and his team in the PP. They seem mellifluous and cowardly to them. Abascal does not attend the plenary sessions much. He walks more around Spain. Espinosa, with an apparently more refined training, is the one who stopped the ultra deputy José María Sánchez García on Tuesday when he picked up his briefcase from his seat and was heading from the henhouse of the Chamber to leave the hemicycle after being expelled by the acting president of the Congress.

Sánchez García, with an engolado verb, had branded the socialist spokesperson who defended the reform of the Penal Code as a “witch” to punish those who harass women who go to clinics to voluntarily interrupt their pregnancy. Several deputies sitting next to Vox heard much stronger offenses from those benches. At that time, early in the afternoon, the president of the Cortes, Meritxell Batet, was not presiding over the session because she was hosting an official lunch with the president of the Senate.

The acting president of Congress, Alfonso Rodríguez Gómez de Celis, listened to the invective and asked the ultra deputy to withdraw it. Both entered into an abstruse discussion about which term should be withdrawn, the president called him to order a second time and the third time he ordered his expulsion. He did it with gentle ways and without raising his voice, but "perhaps not very skilled and very fast, without giving him too much time to reconsider", agreed yesterday when critically analyzing his arbitration sources from all over the parliamentary arch, also from the Socialist. The literality of the Chamber's Rules of Procedure, according to the points of Article 104, formally endorses their actions for the majority of those consulted, but not their expertise.Vox interprets that the president went too far and then the far-right party used its networks and media satellites to equate the “witch” insult with attacks received by its parliamentarians, such as when an ERC deputy called Olona a “fascist”.

On Tuesday, after the attempted expulsion, Olona abruptly confronted a journalist from

who asked her opinion on calling another deputy a “witch”. The image went viral. It has not been the only summons of Vox members, within Congress and at press conferences, against journalists from different media, especially women. When Espinosa does not like a question, he replies, entering the debate with the journalist, his medium, and pointing to him as a "left-wing activist."

The president of Congress summoned the Vox spokesperson in her office on Tuesday night. Batet reproached Espinosa for the bad image offered and warned him that he will not accept "that Vox calls into question the authority of the Presidency of the Chamber." That allusion about authority is not fortuitous either. Congressional sources from almost all parties agreed that the president, reached those limits, had to have expelled the ultra deputy from the room to reaffirm his position and set a precedent for future similar diatribes from Vox. Something that in the end did not happen because it allowed a correction in part. Only two parliamentarians have been ordered to leave the chamber so far: in 2011, Republican Gabriel Rufián; and in 2006, the popular Vicente Martínez Pujalte.

Several ministers and spokesmen admitted after the altercation and with discomfort that it is not easy to manage the new political scene, with populist forces and especially after the increased emergence of Vox.

And they offered contradictory recipes.

A socialist and a PP spokeswoman advocated "not paying attention to their provocations" so as not to obscure the important issues that are addressed in Congress.

From the PNV he proposed to refute his reprimands with hard and dry, but polite rudeness.

Even Rufián, this Wednesday afternoon and in another debate, varied his speech to avoid those duels that make the game to Vox because he recognized that "the 10 minutes of fuss and noise on Tuesday had covered something very beautiful" that had been discussed: clothe people who go for abortions.