Madrid, December 13 (EFE).- The advance of the elections announced this Friday in Aragon further condenses the immediate electoral calendar, since in the next six months there will be four appointments with ballot boxes on different dates: Extremadura on the 21st, Aragon expected on February 8th and, in principle, Castilla y León in March and Andalusia in June.
At least four calls, to which it is not impossible that more will be added during this period or in any case before the scheduled date of May 2027 if, as happened in Extremadura and Aragon, the impulse maintained by PP and Vox in the approval of the regional budgets advises those in charge of Murcia, the Balearic Islands or Cantabria to end the legislative period early.
This regional electoral cycle also has national implications, as a chain of negative results for the parties that form the central government or support it in Congress, amid the current series of scandals, may also lead them to call the Spaniards to parliamentary elections much earlier than expected.
Aragon will hold early elections, expected to take place on February 8, as the last attempt to reach an agreement to approve the 2026 budget plans failed on Friday at a meeting between the regional president Jorge Azcón and the municipality’s Vox leader Alejandro Nolasco.
After that meeting, Finance Minister Roberto Bermúdez de Castro blamed the failure of negotiations on Vox’s “absolutely unshakable” position on ideological issues that go beyond Aragon and are even “illegal,” while Nolasco accused Azcón’s PP of being a “calco of the capricious socialism of María Guardiola,” the president of Extremadura.
The fact is that the Aragonese president, in an upcoming government council, probably next Monday, will approve the decree dissolving the Cortes, so that the elections will take place on Sunday, February 8, in accordance with the provisions of the electoral law, and he will do this with the support of the national leadership of his party.
The leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, explained after the failure of the negotiations in Aragon that the election call corresponds to President Azcón and will not be adopted in an office in Madrid, recalling the coherence of this decision with his approach that the budgets could be extended once, but not indefinitely, as he himself demands from Pedro Sánchez.
Feijóo took the opportunity to attack Vox, saying he does not understand why the formation led by Santiago Abascal has the fundamental goal of “harming” the PP governments.
“I don’t understand why, if Vox’s problem is Mr. Sánchez, he doesn’t let the Popular Party govern after winning the elections; that’s what will be decided in Extremadura, that’s what can be decided in Aragon, that’s what can be said in Castile and Leon,” he added.
The difficulty of reaching an agreement on the budget in Aragon has been at its greatest since the beginning of the talks, which both parties reached in an atmosphere of mutual distrust after the conflict in October over a Vox adviser in the Cortes who published news that the PP described as racist.
Those from Abascal have never forgiven Azcón for calling for the advisor’s dismissal, even though, as they claim, the Aragonese president already knew full well that the procedure for his dismissal had been initiated.
For Vox, what Azcón did was an “unforgivable mess” that ultimately prevented an agreement with the PP in a final meeting that discussed budgets that both parties had agreed on on the assumption that the other’s position would lead to the electoral margin.
Vox took part in this and the previous meetings with the same demands that it persistently makes to all the autonomous governments of the PP, with a focus on the break of European immigration and green policies, and which have so far only been accepted by the popular Valencians, protected by the need to have new accounts for reconstruction after the Dana.
While in the PP they speak of these conditions as “red lines carved in stone”, in Vox they continue to use Carlos Mazón’s successor in the Valencian Community, Juanfran Pérez Llorca, as a model.
The example of the situation is now the third station of the current regional election cycle. In Castilla y León, this week its president, the popular Alfonso Fernández Mañueco, and Vox spokesman in the Cortes, David Hierro, hosted a kind of negotiating framework that was difficult, to say the least.
Mañueco defined this framework in the government pact that both parties signed in 2022, while the Vox spokesman framed it in the commitments recently made between both formations in the Valencian Community and in the proposals of the “Gurruño” – the paper ball into which the regional president turned the document containing Vox’s proposals during the debate on the state of the Community last March. EFE
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