Villalar de los Comuneros (Valladolid) (EFE) This Sunday, Castilla y León Day, has led to a commemoration of the popular festival in Villalar with an air of “resistance” among the more than 21,000 attendees.
The Government Delegation has informed at three in the afternoon that throughout the morning there have been some 6,000 vehicles and up to 20 buses that have had the Valladolid municipality as their destination.
The good weather and the call for the participation of the left-wing parties and unions have recovered in this 2023 edition the massive influx of previous years, with the common thread of criticism of the coalition government, embodied in a manifesto in which 19 Organizations have denounced the setback in rights and the attack on democracy that they see in some decisions of the PP and Vox.
Manueco appeals to freedom to justify Vox
As usual in recent years, the first institutional representative to appear for Villalar has been the president of the Junta de Castilla y León, Alfonso Fernández Mañueco, who has appealed to the four decades of autonomy that this Community has already accumulated, from what He said he was “very proud”.
In statements to journalists, at the foot of the monolith that commemorates the beheading of the community members Bravo, Padilla and Maldonado in 1521, Mañueco has justified, with appeals to “freedom”, the absence in Villalar of the president of the Cortes, Carlos Pollán (Vox), which has organized an open day in Parliament, and the vice president of the Board, Juan García-Gallardo (Vox).
“I fulfill my responsibility and my obligation”, Mañueco summed up upon his arrival in the Plaza Mayor de Villalar, where he has denied that absences decaffeinate the Community party, while he has been critical that the PSOE, other UGT and CCOO parties and unions did not attend the Castilla y León Awards ceremony last Friday.
Mañueco has traveled the street that leads from the Plaza to the cultural center of the municipality, where the Board has organized an exhibition, and after inaugurating it, he has left the municipality without incident around ten in the morning.
Gallardo talks about “aquelarre” and “macrobotellón”
Shortly after, the vice president of the Board, Juan García-Gallardo (Vox), has referred to Villalar’s party as a “coven of the extreme left” and has denied that he has a “legal duty” to go to that “macro bottle”.
Through a tweet, García-Gallardo has defended the “right” of the “other parties”, in reference to the presence of President Alfonso Fernández Mañueco (PP), but has maintained that this “extreme left coven” is organized in the Villalar field “with the excuse of community day.”
The mayor of Villalar de los Comuneros, Luis Alonso Laguna, has been critical of the decline in aid provided to the municipality by the Castilla y León Foundation, directed by Pollán (Vox), to the point that he has called for his disappearance: “ It is not doing anything and it is not fulfilling what its purposes were.” “This foundation should no longer exist”, he has maintained.
The PSOE sees attacks on democracy
As in previous editions, the historic campaign has received the visit of leaders from the federal political and union sphere, such as the government spokesperson, Isabel Rodríguez, who has been named “comunera” by the first president of Castilla y León, the socialist Demetrio Madrid , who later read the Villalar Manifesto 2023.
At the foot of the monolith, Rodríguez has called to “defend democracy, the Constitution and the Statutes of Autonomy” from what he considers “attacks” from the extreme right to which in Castilla y León the right “opened the door”, in reference to the coalition of the PP and Vox.
The leader of the PSOE of Castilla y León, Luis Tudanca, has raised this Community Day as a day of “resistance” against what he sees as an “attack” on the party by the PP and Vox and has argued that this attitude of struggle “is to win”, as a symbol of “hope” in a “present and a future that Castilla y León deserves”.
Some “decent leaders”, Tudanca demanded in his speech during the floral offering, where he claimed that the regional government has to be “with normal, ordinary people, with humble people who work, and who really get up early”.
In the case of Podemos, its regional secretary, Pablo Fernández, has rejected “the attempts of PP and Vox to try to end this popular party” in a Villalar “more vindictive than ever.”
UGT and CCOO, critical of the coalition
The federal leaders of the UGT and CCOO, Pepe Álvarez and Unai Sordo, have also attended the campaign, who have coincided in their criticism of the PP and Vox, whom they have blamed for weakening the collective and threatening freedoms, with a “disaster” of autonomous government.
“We are beginning to understand what the government strategies of the right are when it allies with the extreme right: it tries to weaken everything common and collective, they manage badly so that nothing works well”, Sordo argued, convinced that they want to “destroy the entire framework of social dialogue and the democratic spaces of influence of the workers”.
The streets of Villalar de los Comuneros have thus recovered the usual atmosphere of comings and goings of thousands of citizens, after bad weather last year reduced the influx after two years of the covid pandemic that prevented its celebration.EFE
The entry Tension and political division emerge in Villalar on Castilla y León Day was first published in EFE Noticias.