Linares changes mayor after a motion of censure that has taken four months to celebrate

The third time was the charm in Linares (Jaén, 56,500 inhabitants).

In a session in which moments of tension have been experienced, the City Council has finally held this Tuesday the plenary session to debate the motion of censure presented at the end of February against the municipal government of Ciudadanos and PP.

The socialist Javier Perales, the new councilor from Linares, has finished his first speech in a chaotic plenary session calling for harmony to be restored in a city that has been plunged into a deep social and economic crisis for years, to which has been added the political and judicial grotesqueness experienced in the last four months.

The plenary session of the motion of censure was initially convened on March 12, but a court determined its precautionary suspension after Cs and PP questioned whether two socialist mayors were empowered to vote as they were immersed in judicial investigations.

Later, on June 24, after a judge lifted the precautionary suspension, three months later, and when all the councilors had already taken their seats to start the session, the plenary was suspended again.

The same magistrate who had previously authorized the motion 48 corrected himself and maintained the precautionary suspension.

Finally, the vote could be held this Tuesday, when these precautionary measures were definitively lifted, although at the start of the plenary session the ghost of a new suspension was planned.

From the bench of Cs and PP, two questions have been raised in a way that questioned both the date chosen to hold the session and the ability of a socialist mayor to attend.

"These preliminary issues do not proceed", the municipal secretary has settled, who has given way to the beginning of the plenary session amid the stupor of a few, who shouted "scoundrels!"

to the benches of Cs and PP, and the contained joy of others.

Barely fifty people have been able to access the session hall.

“We do not come here to usurp democracy, nothing is further from reality;

we assume our commitment to get Linares out of the situation in which he finds himself", Perales pointed out to justify the motion of censure, which has gone ahead with the eight votes of the PSOE (which was the party with the most votes in the 2019 elections) , two from IU and three from the localist formation CILU Linares, which has supported the relief but will not be part of the new local government.

Until a little over a year ago, the members of CILU supported the government of Cs and PP, but they left the local Executive due to disagreements.

The outgoing mayor, Raúl Caro-Accino, from Ciudadanos, was the first to congratulate his successor.

Before, yes, he has wanted to take advantage of his management in the last three years in what was, until this Tuesday, the most important mayor's office of his formation in Andalusia.

"They don't hurt me, they hurt Linares", he emphasized, after pointing out as the main achievement the transfer to the city by the Andalusian Government of the old facilities of Santana Motor, the car factory that closed its doors in 2011 by applying generous early retirement benefits to the workforce to counteract the climate of labor tension that the city was experiencing.

Caro-Accino is confident that Santana's old warehouses will revitalize the business fabric of Linares.

In addition to the vote against by the five councilors of the PP and the four of Cs, the motion has also been rejected by the two councilors of the Linares Primero group, to which the socialist Juan Fernández belonged, who was mayor between 1999 and 2019. Fernández had to leave the City Council after being sentenced in April to four years in prison and 10 years of absolute disqualification for a crime of embezzlement of public funds;

a ruling that he has appealed.

This Tuesday, Fernández's colleagues have blamed the motion on a "designed strategy" from the provincial leadership of the PSOE, a party he faced and from which he was expelled.

No member of the socialist provincial leadership has been in the plenary session supporting the new councilor from Linares.

At the exit of the plenary session, the Paseo de Linarejos, the epicenter of life in Linares, did not show any sign that made it visible that Linares had just changed mayor.

The few residents who were concentrated there watched the local politicians almost with disdain.

"Let them talk and stop fighting," exclaimed Antonio García, a skeptical pensioner about the immediate future.