Half-hearted contrition for the infiltration of agents from the Mossos de Esquadra information police station in a teachers’ union assembly. Neither mea culpa nor chest beating. The interior minister, Núria Parlon, and the director general of the Police, Josep Lluís…
Our colleague Jaume V. Aroca, currently dispatched to cover the Andalusian elections, explains in his reports that on the street there is hardly any sign of a campaign. People continue with their own business, more focused on their daily tasks than on rallies, debates, or walks of…
“Let Moreno Bonilla tremble this Sunday!”, warned the socialist José Antonio Carranza, mayor of the town of Pulianas in Granada, where the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, held his penultimate rally of the Andalusian electoral campaign this Wednesday to support María Jesús Montero, before concluding his electoral tour for the 17-M next Friday in Seville.
It was foreseeable. For days now, the script of a campaign strictly regional in nature – from Andalusia and for Andalusia – initially designed by the team of the current president of the community and candidate to renew the position for the third time, has been changing course and increasingly approaching a battle of greater scope.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has warned in its latest annual report that last year disinformation campaigns have established themselves as “a prominent vector” of instability for Spain. The body that advises the President of the Government on National Security matters has identified Russia as the main actor from which campaigns aimed at influencing political processes, eroding trust in institutions, shaping public opinion, and weakening international cooperation originated.
The Department of the Interior admitted this Wednesday to the infiltration of two agents from the Mossos d’Esquadra information unit in the teachers’ assembly in Barcelona, within the framework of the protests by Catalan teachers and the conflict they maintain with the Government. The Minister of the Interior, Núria Parlon, has apologized to the teachers and union members, to whom she has offered a meeting. “I apologize for the feeling of distrust and insecurity regarding the right to protest and your assembly work,” said the socialist leader to the teachers’ representatives present today in the Parliament.
The PSOE leadership faces the final stretch of the electoral campaign in Andalusia just as it began: calling for a “massive last-minute mobilization” of progressive voters and the “concentration” of the left-wing vote on the ballot led by María Jesús Montero as the only “useful vote” to be able to remove Juanma Moreno Bonilla from the presidency of the Junta.
Who was one of the police commanders in the UDEF, when a decade ago the possible existence of a slush fund in the Popular Party was being investigated, has denied that pressure was applied to the investigative unit of the Gürtel Case to remove the name of the then Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy, from their reports, as denounced two weeks ago by the head of those investigations, Chief Inspector Manuel Morocho. In the same courtroom of the National Court where the Kitchen Operation is being tried, the retired police officer, as a witness proposed by the defendants, also declared that there was never an order to dismantle the investigative group surrounding Génova, but quite the opposite: “They were always given the maximum support.”
On Sunday, which according to etymology is the day of the Lord, like all the others, in ancient Rome it was the day dedicated to the Sun. History is made of analogies that sometimes become equivalences. So, having reached the equinox of the campaign in Andalusia, it is fitting…
All election campaigns tend to deviate from their initial trajectory. The PP had designed a white, friendly campaign. The PSOE a red campaign, shouting long live healthcare and public services in general. But everything changed at 11 a.m. on Thursday, 150 kilometers off the coast of Huelva, when two Civil Guard agents died in an accidental collision during an anti-drug operation. As expected, those deaths have become a central part of the campaign.