Oviedo (EFE).- The mayor of Oviedo, Alfredo Canteli, will govern in a minority with the support of the nine PP councilors and the three non-attached who have left the ranks of Ciudadanos to form part of the popular lists in the regional elections and municipal elections on May 28, a decision that has led the orange formation to break the coalition they had maintained since the beginning of the legislature.
Canteli has publicly rejected the ultimatum issued by the Ciudadanos spokesman, Luis Pacho, to withdraw his support for the three councilors who have resigned from the orange formation, who will continue in the municipal plenary session until the next elections as councilors not assigned and with the same responsibilities.
The Oviedo bipartisan thus jumps into the air less than six weeks before the elections are held and after almost four years of coalition government in which Canteli relied on the five Ciudadanos ediles to govern in majority.
The former coordinator of Ciudadanos in Asturias and current deputy mayor of Oviedo, Ignacio Cuesta, resigned from Ciudadanos last Friday shortly before announcing that he would join the PP and that he would be part of Canteli’s candidacy for Mayor as number three .
On the same day, the councilor for Social Centers, Education and Public Health, Lourdes García, took the same step and announced that she would occupy tenth place on the municipal list of the PP, a party with which the Councilor for Culture, José Luis Costillas, will run to the regional elections as number ten on the list headed by Diego Canga, after having abandoned Ciudadanos.
Cuesta had avoided confirming in recent months whether he would run again in the municipal elections on May 28 with the candidacy of the PP, although he had already renounced being part of the Ciudadanos list again, which he led in the 2019 elections.
His departure, expected for months, immediately led the leadership of Ciudadanos to demand that Canteli withdraw his powers as a government team from Cuesta, Costilla and García since they have them under the agreement signed between both parties in 2019.
The orange formation, which has declared the coalition agreement broken and announced that in the remaining weeks it will exercise opposition, had demanded that the three councilors who were part of their municipal group return their minutes of councilors to comply with the letter ethics that they voluntarily signed when they joined Ciudadanos.
Reorganization of the municipal plenary
The changes of the latter will force the reorganization of the municipal plenary session, which will meet tomorrow on an extraordinary basis to address them, since Pacho will cease his functions as mayor released from Buildings and Heritage, and Alfonso Pereira, in charge of Urban Roads and Lighting.
The three “defaulters”, in principle, will remain in their government responsibilities with the same salary and advisers, while Ciudadanos will see their representation in municipal commissions reduced.
For the mayor, it is not a problem to govern in a minority with a month remaining until the elections; What’s more, he hopes that this minority “will become a majority support” and even that, if the project for La Vega, one of the most ambitious, is carried out in full before the corporation is dissolved, it can count on the support of others aediles
If the two remaining councilors in Ciudadanos have advanced the possibility of voting against that project before learning about it “it would be an inconsistency”, the first Oviedo mayor has qualified.
I refuse to be considered defectors
Canteli has rejected that the three now non-attached councilors can be considered defectors because the change has been made in the final stretch and not a year or two after the bipartite was formed. “Times are what they are and the decision was made to good,” he added.
According to Canteli, the coalition “worked very well and everything did not work so badly” and with the changes that will be formalized tomorrow in the extraordinary plenary session, “it does not change much” either, since with the resignation of Pacho and Pereira “there are enough people to cover their absence ”and some powers that, according to the mayor, did not give much either.
“The truth is, I don’t remember,” Canteli added when asked about the agreement signed by the PP and Ciudadanos at the beginning of the legislature, which put an end to the defecting councillors.
After affirming that he feels “much better mayor than in 2019” after a few years in which “he has learned and suffered a lot when verifying that the times in the administration are not as fast as he wants”, he has recognized that he has not been able to do everything that he wanted, but that he feels “young and excited” to face four more years at the helm of the Consistory. EFE