Unprecedented political earthquake in the Madrid City Council. Felipe Llamas, one of the four councilors of the Mixed Group that this afternoon had signed an agreement with PP and Citizens for the new 2022 accounts, has submitted his resignation to the act, as Europa Press has advanced on the night of this Monday and has been able to confirm this newspaper. Even so, the new Budgets for next year for the capital of Spain would go ahead as 29 councilors are needed. PP and Ciudadanos, which together have 26 councilors, would need three votes yes or yes to secure the accounts for 2022. The City Council of the capital has 57 councilors. The extraordinary plenary session will foreseeably be held this Wednesday at the Palacio de Cibeles.
"The fact of not having been able to convince my colleagues to carry out a dialogue and negotiation in conditions of seeking broad consensus leads me to make the decision to present my resignation, making it clear that I do not agree with the Budgets de Almeida for 2022, ”Llamas said in statements to the agency. "In any case, for the good of the city of Madrid, I hope they make the right decisions and take the appropriate measures."
"In a time of emergency, so difficult for the city, it is more necessary than ever to seek broad consensus with the opposition as a whole to have new budgets that really respond to the feelings of the majority of Madrid men and women. In short, a process of dialogue to achieve budgets endowed with the maximum legitimacy ”. Nor, he said, does he share the "format of the negotiation, nor the rush to reach a hasty agreement" and reiterates that he has maintained a "clear attitude" in favor of dialogue, but that this has not been possible if there is an outrage in the times".
The announcement has caught the rest of the councilors of the Mixed Group by surprise, as this newspaper has been able to confirm. “We already knew that he did not agree”, explain sources of the same, “but we insist that we do not vote en bloc. We have always said that everyone should vote what they want. Maximum respect for the opinions of each one ”. According to training sources, the mayor has sent a WhatsApp message to the rest of the mayor after eight in the afternoon, where they have learned of the resignation. The resignation of Llamas opens a new gap in the left-wing bloc, which on Monday afternoon has already harshly criticized the agreement reached between the Mixed Group, PP and Ciudadanos.
The four councilors of the Mixed Group call themselves Recupera Madrid. They left Más Madrid in April this year due to disagreements with the party's spokesperson, Rita Maestre. The four councilors receive the label of carmenistas, for being on the electoral lists. The four councilors are: Marta Higueras, who is a close friend of Carmena and who was the deputy mayor of the capital during her tenure; Luis Cueto, the political nephew of the former mayor and who was her general coordinator of the mayoralty; and José Manuel Calvo, its head of Urban Planning, one of the strongest portfolios of the City Council. "From day one," Carmena writes in the foreword to the book Progressive Government Manual published a few months ago by Calvo himself, "he was an indispensable collaborator to launch a new way of understanding the city."And Felipe Llamas, who was Carmena's chief of staff at the Palacio de Cibeles.
The environment of the mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, for the moment is silent after the resignation of Llamas.
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