On this occasion everything plays in favor of the socialist leader compared to what happened four years ago, in the summer of 2017, where he had to measure with Patricia Hernández and Juan Fernando López Aguilar to rise to the leadership of the party. On that occasion Torres won four of the seven islands, While Patricia Hernández won in Tenerife, La Gomera and El Hierro. In total, the leader of the PSOE received the support of 43.59% of the militants who went to the polls.
Pandemic management and CC leadership favor internal unanimity
Four years later the situation is very different. Torres managed two years later to rise to the Presidency of the Canarian Government, something that the PSOE had not achieved since the 1990s, and became the second socialist president in the autonomous history of the Canary Islands. At an organic level, the scenario is also different from that of 2017 since at that time Torres did have an internal response in an important part of the Tenerife organization, in fact, in the primaries he was in third position on the island against Hernández and López Aguilar. Any indication of dissent has been covered up by the outbreak of the pandemic and the entire party supports Torres’s management without fissures in the Government because he is the only one that can face the 2023 elections with sufficient guarantees of victory against the great electoral rival of the PSOE , that is, the Canary Islands Coalition.
A sample button is what was recently declared by the mayor of Adeje, José Miguel Rodríguez Fraga, at the time president of the Socialist Party in the Executive that Torres formed in the previous Congress. Rodríguez Fraga is the oldest mayor of the Canarian PSOE and a reference for a good part of Tenerife’s socialism who bet in 2017 on Patricia Hernández, who had already won a primary in 2014 and was vice president of the Canary Islands Government until she was expelled from the Executive by the nationalists.
Rodríguez Fraga acknowledges that “I did not vote for Ángel Víctor in the primaries, but if they were held now, I would vote for him” and admits that the government pact and its president “have been at the height” in managing the pandemic, therefore who trusts Torres to get the Canary Islands out of the crisis caused by Covid.
The socialist leader will go as head of delegation to the federal Congress
The Regional Committee will be held tomorrow at the Infecar facilities, in the capital of Gran Canaria, and will be in person. The convocation of the highest body between congresses is extraordinary to present the framework presentation that will be taken to the next Congress in November, a document that sets out the programmatic lines of the organization for the next four years. Ángel Víctor Torres will open the meeting at 11.30 am in an intervention open to the media and the party’s social networks. The Minister of Health, Carolina Darias, is invited to the event.
Before the celebration of the regional conclave in November, the general secretary of the Canarian Socialists will attend the 40th Federal Congress of Valencia on October 15, 16 and 17 as head of the delegation of Gran Canaria, for which he presented his candidacy to be endorsed . For Tenerife, the head of the delegation is the mayor of La Laguna, Luis Yeray Gutiérrez, one of the leaders of the new batch of the Tenerife organization.