The preludes to the meeting between the PP and the PSOE in Aragon did not predict an agreement, quite the contrary. A few hours before the meeting with the minister and leader of the PSOE in Aragon, Pilar Alegría, the president of Aragon, Jorge Azcón, wrote a tweet that accompanied the photograph of the socialist leader during a meal with the former councilor of La Moncloa Paco Salazar, accused of sexual harassment, an appointment for which she had to apologize. “It will be a pleasure to tell you that the fight against gender-based violence is a priority of my government, so that cases like that of your friend Francisco Salazar do not go unpunished,” Azcón criticized him in his message on social networks.
Despite this climate of total political shock, Alegría claims to have proposed to Azcón to open a negotiation to support the budget, which, according to the minister, the popular president rejected. “If Azcón calls elections, it will be on a whim, out of personal interest or incompetence,” lamented the PSOE candidate for the next elections in Aragon, which everything indicates will take place in February. The people respond that they do not believe in the socialists’ desire to negotiate. “They (the PSOE) are not trustworthy and, therefore, we cannot reach any type of agreement,” Aragonese Treasury Minister Roberto Bermúdez de Castro later said.
Alegría explained at a press conference in Zaragoza after the meeting with Azcón that she had proposed creating a technical commission to reach an agreement on budgets. The minister spokesperson for the government of Pedro Sánchez informed the Aragonese president that, as proof of its desire for agreement, the PSOE would vote in favor of its path of stability.
The response she got, according to the socialist leader, was that the PP “does not trust” the PSOE. “Mr. Azcón has bitten this outstretched hand,” lamented Alegría, who believes that the Aragonese president is finding “excuses either to agree with Vox or to bring the autonomous community to the elections.” Alegría then repeated up to four times that if, as everything indicates, the Aragonese president anticipates the elections in Aragon, it will be “on a whim, out of personal interest, out of incompetence or for all at once.”
On the other hand, the PP maintains that the PSOE’s offer was a “sham” and its outstretched hand, “a rotten hand.” “This is the most rigged meeting I have ever participated in,” lamented the Aragonese Minister of the Treasury. Bermúdez de Castro described the socialist minister as “(Pedro) Sánchez’s most advantageous apprentice.”
The failure of negotiations with the PSOE ends up supporting a context which leads to early elections in Aragon next February, according to sources from the Aragonese PP. In reality, the budgets were condemned this Tuesday, Vox slamming the door on public accounts, and the PP assumes that Azcón will call the polls in the coming days. If this were the case next Monday, one of the possibilities which has strengthened in recent hours, the elections would take place on February 8.
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