The actual mayor of Santa Cruz de TenerifeJosé Manuel Bermúdez (Canarian Coalition), and the councilor of the government group Evelyn Alonso are officially turncoats since 2021, according to the Pact for Institutional Stability and Fight against Political Transfuguism. Both acquired this condition in 2020 after Alonso entered the Corporation to replace the resignation of a Ciudadanos councilor, ignored the orders of the party with which he obtained his certificate and supported a motion of censure that evicted the PSOE and its party from the government. and placed José Manuel Bermúdez in the mayor’s office instead of Patricia Hernández through an agreement between the Canarian Coalition and the Popular Party.
The Monitoring Commission of the Pact for Institutional Stability and the fight against Political Transfuguism agreed, at its meeting in March 2021, to request an opinion from the commission of experts on the matter when doubts were raised about the matter due to the matter having been dealt with after that the motion of censure was consummated and Evelyn Alonso had denounced formal defects in the expulsion file launched by Ciudadanos.
In this regard, the opinion, from April 2021, is clear: “In the absence of an expulsion agreement, either because the mandatory agreement has been adopted irregularly or because it had not been agreed upon in the case, the position of absconder remains when “An elected local representative clearly deviates from the recommendations and requirements of his political party and decisively facilitates a change of municipal government through a motion of censure.” And in the specific case of Santa Cruz de Tenerife “there are no doubts in this regard on the part of the Ciudadanos political formation, according to the documentation provided to this Commission, in which it is stated that Mrs. Evelyn Alonso Hernández departed from the party’s discipline by facilitating decisively the motion of censure in the Canary Islands Consistory.
The opinion of the Committee of Experts, assumed by the Monitoring Commission of the Pact against Political Transfuguism, is devastating for all purposes because it downplays the disciplinary result initiated by Ciudadanos to focus on the political act of a councilor who ignores the direct orders of his party regarding the motion of censure: “The case at hand highlights a known pattern of transfuguismo, in which the political formation that has won the municipal elections loses the Mayor’s Office due to the disloyalty of one of the elected representatives, who unilaterally grants the position of mayor to another candidate outside his or her political group, who until that moment had been part of the opposition in the municipal government.”
The entire government group
But the resolution goes much further by including the entire government group that benefited from Evelyn Alonso’s action as a turncoat. Starting with the mayor, José Manuel Bermúdez, and continuing with the rest of the councilors of the Canarian Coalition and the Popular Party, with Carlos Tarife at the head, who benefited from this action.
According to Addendum II to the Pact against Turncoats, “the measures provided for in this agreement with respect to turncoats will also apply to those members of local entities that benefit from their conduct.” Therefore, the opinion concludes that, given “the direct collaboration between Mrs. Evelyn Alonso Hernández and the members of the new municipal government to materialize the motion of censure, it is possible to affirm the existence of ‘indirect transfuguism’ attributable to the mayor and the list of beneficiary councilors. of the initial absconding behavior.
As a consequence of the motion of censure that in July 2020 removed Mayor Patricia Hernández, of the PSOE, and her socialist and Ciudadanos councilors from the municipal government, the Tenerife capital became governed by a government between the Canary Coalition and the PP in which the turncoat Evelyn Alonso was appointed head of the departments of Security and Mobility, Economic Promotion and Environment, with an annual remuneration of 60,284.11 euros. The fact that she was considered a turncoat did not prevent him from benefiting economically and politically from the results of her action.
In her agreements with the Canary Coalition, signed before a notary in Santa Cruz de Tenerife before the censorship, it was included that Alonso would be included in the party lists for the next elections in 2023, which was the case. Currently, with Bermúdez still as mayor, Evelyn Alonso is part of the government group as an independent with the responsibilities of Mobility and Accessibility. She is the ninth deputy mayor.
