The public support of the PSOE leadership, expressed last Saturday during the Regional Committee by the general secretary, Ángel Víctor Torres, for José Julián Mena to repeat for the third time as a candidate for Mayor of Arona has been the trigger that has led to the four socialist mayors critical of the alderman who remained in the government group to resign yesterday from their areas of responsibility, although they will maintain their minutes as councillors.
The delivery of the delegations of José Luis Gómez, Councilor for Youth, Elena Cabello (Social Services), Yurena García (Citizen Participation) and Pura Martín (Parties and Seniors) took place at the headquarters of the Citizen Service (SAC) of Los Cristianos and confirms the impossibility, in case there was any doubt, of any hint of reconciliation between the two opposing sectors of the party just eight months before the municipal elections.
The four leave the local government upset with their party, which they reproach for not having kept its word after “the federal leadership of the PSOE and the secretariats of the regional and insular organization communicated to us on several occasions their firm decision to oppose Mena repeated as a candidate in the municipality”, they explain in a statement.
“For two long years, the six councilors have maintained party discipline, going so far as to participate in meetings organized by the PSOE itself to unseat the mayor through a motion of censure in coordination with other municipal political forces”, indicate the councilors, who assure that their party informed them that the candidate to preside over the Consistory and lead the party in Arona would be Dácil León.
In addition, the unruly councilors with Mena confirmed yesterday that they transferred all the documentary information of the public management in the City Council that required “different organs of the PSOE” with the aim of “strengthening the decision” not to support the current mayor.
The resignation of the four councilors from their delegations, considered “within the foreseeable” among the seven mayors who remain in the local government, will force the assumption of new areas of responsibility among the team related to the municipal councilor in the final stretch of mandate.
From the municipal Executive, the critical sector has been reproached during the last two years for its attitude in the municipal plenary sessions for its “indiscipline” in key votes that prevented, they say, the approval of measures that benefited all the residents of Arona.
Precisely, the resignations occurred on the date on which José Julián Mena became a candidate for Mayor, at the end of yesterday’s session the period by which the incumbent councilors automatically renew their candidacies, except in the municipalities with more of 20,000 inhabitants, in which the majority of militants opt for the celebration of primaries, something that has not happened in the municipality with the largest population in the south of the Island.
Tower Support
Last Saturday, during the PSOE Regional Committee, the general secretary of the party in the Canary Islands, Ángel Víctor Torres, publicly endorsed Mena as a candidate and called “to redirect with all the comrades who stood for the 2019 elections to strengthen and make the PSOE of Arona, Tenerife and the Canary Islands bigger”.
The relations between the two opposing sectors of the PSOE in the City Council were broken as a result of the dismissal of the Councilor for Urban Planning, Luis García, in June 2020, a measure that opened a deep crisis that the party tried to settle with the expulsions of Mena and García, and that the courts annulled in the mayor’s case.
José Luis Gómez, Elena Cabello, Yurena García and Pura Martín remained in the Government team, although relations with Mena and his mayors had been broken for more than two years. Previously, Dácil León and Juan Sebastián Roque were dismissed, who together with Luis García, today in the group of non-attached, filed a complaint in January 2021 in which they accused the mayor and the municipal secretary of prevaricating and committing fraud of law by withdraw an item from the agenda in a plenary session in which Mena’s pass to the status of non-attached councilor should be reported, which, if it occurred, would open the door to a motion of censure.
But the Justice ended up, again, agreeing with the mayor and the secretary.
