The socialist Carolina Gracia has been elected the new mayor of Orihuela following the vote of no confidence tabled against the Partido Popular council, presented on Monday morning by the PSOE, Ciudadanos and Cambiemos.
The motion of censure was successful thanks to the votes of the six councillors from the PSOE, the five from Ciudadanos and the three councillors representing Cambiemos/Unides Podem who saw their motion carried by 14 votes to 11.
Vox, the extreme right, also positioned itself against the change in power, during the plenary session that began at noon, in the former offices of the CAM, now the headquarters of the Orihuela town hall.
Although the Ciudadanos councillors, led by José Aix, will continue as members of the government team, the move has still not received the endorsement of their national leadership. Cambiemos, meanwhile, will not be included into the new council but will provide their support to the coalition from the fringe.
The ousted mayor Emilio Bascuñana said that she is leaving with a “clear conscience and his head held high” although he was blamed for the perceived ungovernability of the municipality by Aix, who also accused him of showing no respect to the C’s in the distribution of powers and for putting a brake on investment. Aix also guaranteed “loyalty” to his new travel companions and who warned him, “do not fail us.”
María García, spokesperson for the PSOE, underlined the “failure” of Bascuñana’s management and the profound institutional crisis that the City Council is experiencing.
Similarly, María García, from Cambiemos, has said that her group is committed to getting Orihuela out of the jam it is in, as she attacked Bascuñana, raising the accusation of embezzlement, and the charge that he received more than 200,000 euros from the Ministry of Health without there being any record proof of the work that he did prior to his role of mayor.
Vox councillor María Asunción Aniorte blamed both PP and Cs for mismanagement, as she voiced her opposition to the change in government.
Carolina Gracia justified the motion of censure saying that it was her “responsibility” to “remove the City Council and the municipality of Orihuela from it’s situation of stagnation”. “We are not going to remain with our arms crossed while the management continues to flounder,” she said.
The first measure that the new mayor, Carolina Gracia, wants to carry out is to seek approval of the first municipal budgets since 2018. The accounts will be approved “in a few weeks”, before the summer, as she said in her first statements to the media.
Details of the government pact between PSOE and Ciudadanos have not yet been made public, but the spokesman for the C’s, José Aix, spoke briefly about the makeup of it’s councillors stating that he thought his party will maintain almost the same council positions that they had been holding during their pact with the Popular Party, with the exception of Education, which will fall to the PSOE while Ciudadanos will add the Department of Festivities.
The vote has sent shockwaves well beyond the local political commune stirring great expectations in the capital De la Vega Baja because, as of today, the PP has lost one of its great fiefdoms in the province and in the Valencian Community.
