Ten months after the inauguration of Julio Pérez as popular mayor of Maracena (Granada, 22,200 inhabitants), its City Council will vote on a motion of censure that could remove the PP from municipal power. The PSOE of Maracena, which has seven councillors, has announced that early this Tuesday it will present the documentation for the measure, which has brought together Izquierda Unida (three councillors) and the local party Maracena Conecta (one councillor). They thus add up to 11 votes compared to the remaining 10 which, if nothing goes wrong, will serve to turn the PSOE candidate, Carlos Porcel, into the new Maracenero mayor, when a year has passed since the kidnapping of a socialist councilor at the hands of the couple of the then socialist mayor who convulsed local politics.
The current government team is supported by six votes from the PP, two from Vox, two from Quiero Maracena and one from Maracena Conecta. It is their candidate, Amabel Adarve Anguita, current deputy mayor and councilor for Sports, Events and Youth, who now joins the socialists and IU to form a new government team. All the councilors who signed the motion of censure went to a notary in the capital on Monday afternoon to authenticate their signatures, a prior step to presenting the text of the motion of censure. Once this is presented, the Socialists' forecast is that on April 16, in two weeks, an extraordinary plenary session will be held to change the mayor.
The PSOE was the party with the most votes and with the most councilors in the last municipal elections in May 2023, as has been the case since 2007. It won, but it did not get enough councilors to govern alone or together with IU. The week before election day was turbulent because three days before, a judge announced an investigation resulting from the kidnapping of a socialist councilor at the hands of the couple whose mayor and socialist candidate, Berta Linares, was. The judicial investigation was directed against Linares herself, her spokesperson until then, Antonio García Leyva, and the previous mayor of the city and then number three of the Andalusian PSOE, Noel López. Months later, that came to nothing but the commotion caused, according to the PSOE, a notable drop in votes for the socialists in relation to their forecasts.
The ten months of popular government have been, as the signatories of the motion explain in a statement, full of “incapacity, ineffectiveness, poor management, privatization attempts, labor complaints and neighborhood neglect.” Given this circumstance, they explain, a change of course is “essential to give stability and a future to Maracena,” the three spokespersons for the groups that signed the motion of censure have certified. Carlos Porcel has explained to this newspaper that "the situation of the city council with this mayor is totally unsustainable, with a considerable loss of democratic quality, a loss of quality of services and an endless list of scandals." Regarding the latter, whoever was the candidate with the most votes, he remembers that "the mayor's first measure was to exclude victims of gender violence from job boards", something "scandalous and unacceptable." At the end of the year, he adds, “they lost 400,000 euros of aid for not presenting the documentation on time. In general, they have carried out a management full of chaos and with their backs turned to the citizens,” he concludes.
Asked if he is sure that the signatories of the motion of censure will remain united and firm in their intention during the two weeks remaining until the full vote, Porcel has expressed confidence that there will be no fissures. Also Antonio García Leyva, socialist councilor, who explains that “surely, especially the Maracena Conecta councilor will have a lot of pressure but she will surely endure it because,” he assures, “she is as dissatisfied as the socialists with what is happening.”
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