The departure of the Arona Government group of the four socialist councilors critical of Mena has been the latest episode of a convulsive municipal mandate that has dynamited stability in the local Executive and that has forced the Justice to pass sentence.
The resignation of the mayors took place the same day that the candidacy of the current mayor for re-election with the acronym of the PSOE was confirmed, after in the last Regional Committee, its general secretary, Ángel Víctor Torres, publicly endorsed the alderman, although calling for an impossible understanding between the two sectors.
The permanence of José Julián Mena (44 years old) at the head of the Arona City Council and in his own party is a case of political survival worthy of analysis. A little over a year ago, a sector of his political formation considered him dead as mayor and socialist militant after he was expelled from the party, after Ferraz and the regional and Tenerife leadership decided so, and after seven PSOE councilors blew up blown up the municipal group and transferred their differences to the courts. A scenario that seemed to sentence Mena to hand over the baton by choice or via a motion of censure and go to the opposition as a non-attached councilor.
But Mena did not give up and since the crisis broke out in his municipal group, staged with the dismissal of Luis García as Councilor for Urban Planning in June 2020, he has defended himself like a cat on his back in the courts, achieving, to the surprise of those who they considered him liquidated, reverse the situation and emerge gracefully from each litigation waged in court against his party and the critical councilors who were part of his list in 2019.
Thus, José Julián Mena won the pulse in court of the federal, regional and insular leadership of the PSOE, who signed his expulsion (and that of Luis García) to end the crisis in the government group. First with precautionary measures and, later, the judge agreeing with him by fully estimating the mayor’s demand, which not only prevented his departure from the PSOE, but also deactivated a possible motion of censure with which he sought to end his mandate after achieving in 2019 an absolute majority that, in practice, barely lasted a year, when the government group split in two.
Before the Justice ruled, the mayor covered his back by filing an appeal in Ferraz against his expulsion, which disrupted the strategy of the critical sector and the opposition during a plenary session, held in November 2020, in which they asked its pass to the non-attached group considering that the expulsion of the PSOE was firm since it had already been notified to the City Council.
The municipal secretary, Pedro Javier Hernández, included in the agenda the point in which the communication of the PSOE and the transfer to the group of non-attached councilors of the mayor was recorded, but he also recorded the organic resource presented at the last minute by Mena, which led him to argue that the expulsion from the party could not be executed in plenary until said appeal was resolved. The councilor then accepted article 70 of the Municipal Organic Regulation and withdrew the item from the agenda.
The mayors Dácil León and Juan Sebastián Roque, both from the PSOE, and the non-attached councilor Luis García filed a complaint in which they accused the mayor and the municipal secretary of prevaricating and committing fraud by withdrawing the controversial item from the agenda. But, again, Justice would agree with the alderman.
Judge Nelson Díaz Frías, head of the Investigating Court Number 4 of Arona, ruled on August 17 the Provisional dismissal of the complaint filed by the three councilors. According to the order, both the mayor and the municipal secretary acted in accordance with the law and the two reports by Pedro Javier Hernández presented “total consistency with each other.”
To these judicial pronouncements favorable to Mena must be added the resolution of a file opened in the Prosecutor’s Office as a result of the documentation presented by Luis García in which he denounced alleged interference and external coercion exerted on Urban Planning technicians to influence the processing of certain files. After analyzing the documentation and recordings provided and taking statements from several witnesses, the Prosecutor’s Office decided to file the file provisionally.
José Julián Mena has been the Mayor of Arona since 2015 after ending the hegemony of the Canarian Coalition. In 2019 he obtained an absolute majority, although a year later, after the crisis broke out in the government group, he lost half of the support of his councillors, which has forced him to govern the third most populous municipality on the Island with the support of just six councilors.
With the polls in favor and an opposition immersed in sluggishness, Mena faces an electoral horizon that no one could imagine in the most turbulent stage of his mandate. After the arbitration of the courts, the PSOE management has gone to the VAR two years later and has rescinded the red card. Now, Mena wants to look for his hat-trick in the Mayor’s Office.
