Centre-right urged to break regional pacts with Vox after Sánchez ‘hate speech’

Spain’s Partido Popular must immediately break its pacts with the far-right Vox in the regions and municipalities where they govern together, Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares and other members of the progressive government demanded on Monday after Vox leader Santiago Abascal directed “hate speech” at Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez.

Abascal gave an interview to the Argentinian paper Clarín over the weekend, in which he claimed that, like past dictators (such as Mussolini), there could come a time when Sánchez (whom Vox considers a “dictator”) could meet the same cruel end.

“There will be a moment when the people will want to hang him by his feet,” Abascal commented in the interview.

At the presentation of his second book “Tierra Firme” (solid ground), in Madrid on Monday, Sánchez accused the Vox leader, a personal friend of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of “trying to inoculate hatred” in society, RTVE reported.

Sanchez also called on PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo to reflect on his relationship with Vox, with which he governs in several regions and town councils in Spain, including in the country’s third-largest city, Valencia.

Sánchez described Vox as a “party of hate” and recalled that Abascal had planned to become the new vice-president of the Spanish government alongside Núñez Feijóo if the PP leader had managed to form a sufficient majority to govern after the snap general election on 23 July.

“It is a hate speech that incites violence (…) I call on the PP to clearly condemn words that no European leader would dare to endorse and to break all pacts (with Vox) in the hundreds of city councils and autonomous communities (…)”, Albares said upon his arrival at the EU Foreign Affairs Council in Brussels, EFE reported.

Other government ministers also joined the cascade of reactions against Vox.

Also from Brussels, where he attended an Agriculture and Fisheries Council meeting on Monday, Agriculture and Fisheries Minister Luis Planas described Abascal’s statements as “intolerable” and “unacceptable” and stressed that they are “a manifestation of political hatred” that has not been seen in Spain “since 1938”, shortly before the start of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).

Meanwhile, Ernest Urtasun, Spanish Culture Minister and spokesman for the progressive platform Sumar, which governs in coalition with Sanchez’s PSOE, said on Monday that Abascal’s words were “regrettable, unfortunate and extremely dangerous” and “reminiscent of times gone by”.

“They (PP) must immediately break all the agreements with Vox, which is what gives them (the far-right) wings”, the Minister demanded.

The PP should follow the path of its political brothers in Germany, the CDU, who have always refused to pact anything with the far-right, Urtasun added.

Despite the controversy, the Secretary General of Vox, Ignacio Garriga, refuted all the accusations against its leader on Monday.

“Abascal has recalled the fate of some dictators, and some people call that hatred, but no, that is not hatred. It is history,” Garriga stressed at a press conference at Vox’s headquarters in Madrid.

(Fernando Heller | EuroEFE.Euractiv.es)