“I am very excited about this new challenge that the party poses for me after being away from organic political life for a while.” This is how it is expressed lopez afonso, since yesterday new general coordinator of the Popular Party in Tenerife, after the unanimous decision of the Board of Directors that presides until the next congress, presumably in April, the mayor of Santiago del Teide, Emilio Navarro. The Board, meeting in Santa Cruz, has proceeded to appoint the former mayor of the city of Puerto de la Cruz (2015-2019) to this position.
The president of the insular PP praises the political trajectory of the Puerto Rican “who transformed the city of which he was mayor.” Consensus prevails around the figure of the designated who will accompany Navarro in the new stage of the popular of Tenerife after the march of Manuel Domínguez to the presidency of the PP of the Canary Islands. Navarro points out that “a little over a year before the local and regional elections, it is necessary not only to start outlining strategies, but also the most important thing: to have the best”.
In this transition period, Lope Afonso will know the concerns of the local committees of the PP. Navarro points out that “it will be a period of listening to our public officials and the militancy in the municipalities of the Island to articulate the strategy for the next local elections.”
Domínguez, for his part, considers that “justice is done with one person, Lope Afonso. Time gives and takes away reasons and it has been given to him». He considers that with his arrival the path is designed to get to have “the best team”. He feels “proud” of his return.
Illusion before a new challenge. Is he Afonso’s feeling on his return to politics. Although he acknowledges that he has thought about it with some reflection, he assures that he has “valued” Emilio Navarro’s offer, with Manuel Domínguez, already as regional president, and in the heat of the recent events that the PP has experienced to consider that “it was the right time, with the right people, to pitch in and contribute.”
He considers that after an “intense experience in politics” this time away from it “has helped me to mature personally and face other challenges.” He believes that she returns with “the doses of experience, wisdom and maturity that are demanded.” He considers that the PP “is the most appropriate project to infuse Spanish society with the doses of common sense it needs with an institutional life more in line with what it demands and not so radicalized.”
He understands that “the PP has the main thing, ideas, principles and values, to make the Spaniards progress socially and economically towards a more cohesive country.” Those values, he points out «have been dynamited by the bad action of the government of Pedro Sanchez». And his alliances “with parties that want to destroy the model of coexistence of the transition and the state of the autonomies.” He sees this as the moment in the regional and insular sphere in which the PP’s recipes are necessary again ». He values the national renewal impulse of Alberto Feijóo and the regional one of Manuel Domínguez.
Trajectory
Lope Afonso Hernández (Puerto de la Cruz, 1979). He joined New Generations in 1998. Mayor of the tourist city in the 2015-2019 term. In the municipal elections of May 26, 2019, a pact between the PSOE and the Portuense Assembly unseats the mayor. On September 4, 2019, he is sentenced to nine years of special disqualification from employment or public office for a continued crime of prevarication. In 2021, the Provincial Court of Santa Cruz de Tenerife acquitted him of the charges against him.
