Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (EFE).- The former Minister of Health Carolina Darias, of the PSOE, has been elected this Saturday mayor of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria thanks to the agreement signed between her party with Nueva Canarias and Unidas Sí Podemos.
Darías, who this Saturday became the second woman to hold this position and the first to do so on behalf of the PSOE, has had the support of 15 councilors (12 from the PSOE, 2 from Nueva Canarias and 1 from Unidas Sí Podemos ), while the municipal opposition will be exercised by the PP with 9 councilors, Vox with four and CC with one.
In her speech, the only representative of the PSOE who has taken office this Saturday as the head of one of the great Spanish cities, has defined herself as “the mayoress of the people” and has guaranteed that she will work “for the utopia of a better city ”.
The constitution of the plenary session of the City Council of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria has been attended by the minister spokesperson, Isabel Rodríguez, and the acting president of the Canary Islands, Ángel Víctor Torres, before whom Darias has accepted, with “gratitude, commitment and determination” the challenge to respond to the trust placed in it by the residents who placed the PSOE in the past 28M as the first political force in the city.
After the 29 councilors of the corporation swore or promised their position and facilitated the proclamation of the new councilor with their vote, which has meant the beginning of the XII democratic corporate mandate of the institution, Darias recalled that “in the municipal house ” began in politics.
“Everything comes back here and I do it with a voracious illusion, an excessive passion and an unlimited responsibility” to be in charge of “a solid government that will act cohesively to offer a future and hope”, said Darias, who has assured that it is very aware “of the role of cities in an increasingly urbanized world”.
Make Las Palmas de Gran Canaria “inclusive, safe and sustainable”, giving importance to the local as the germ of innovation so that this city is a space for ideas of progress, opportunities and the future in which all neighborhoods count equally , will be one of the objectives of the new government group, he said.
Carolina Darias has guaranteed that her government will promote the physical, economic and social well-being of the residents, aware that “the biggest challenge is still called inequality”, and will work to make Las Palmas de Gran Canaria more sustainable and green, and also more prosperous , “with better jobs and urban and responsible tourism”, as well as more accessible and with “more and better homes”, something that, as he stressed, will be his greatest challenge.
On behalf of his partner NC, Pedro Quevedo has stressed that the three parties that have governed the city for the last four years, and that will continue to do so this mandate, “have shown that they can transform it” despite the fact that in this “very hard time they have not been able to more things happen”, among which he has cited the tension, in his opinion unprecedented, that has prevailed at the national level and that has generated “a brutal polarization” that “those who have been left in the middle” have suffered a lot.
The fellow government partner of the PSOE and NC for United Sí Podemos, Gemma Martínez, has expressed her pride in working in a government led by a woman and has stressed that Las Palmas de Gran Canaria “has voted for progress”, so in this In the new legislature, its City Council will be a “bulwark” of these ideas “against the Spain of bullfighters and Berlanga” that, in his opinion, “the right” offers.
“This government will give the green color hope to a friendlier and more accessible city, where children will be able to play in the street, and which, furthermore, will be diverse and proud to be so, since everyone will have a place in it,” Martínez proclaimed in reference to the next LGTBI Pride celebration.
The anger and boos from the public have come with the intervention of the first Vox spokesman in the city, where this formation has achieved four representatives, Alberto Rodríguez, who has recalled that his party is the third political force and has recriminated “the lies and the physical violence that has been exercised against its headquarters and public and organic positions.
“We will not tolerate that the propagators of hate and lies continue to harass us, as the rector of the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria has done when he affirmed that those who vote for Vox are fascists who come out of the closet without any reproach and without it having meant his resignation”, he asserted.
Among the public that followed the constitution of the new City Council in the Pérez Galdós Theater, Rodríguez’s words provoked a loud protest, in which Darias had to mediate to remember that in a democracy “you have to learn to listen even if you don’t like what is said ”, when he asked rhetorically “how many lives would have been saved if the Minister of Health Salvador Illa had accepted Vox’s proposals” during the covid-19 pandemic.
The Vox spokesman has assured that the Metroguagua project, promoted by the former socialist councilor and next vice president of the Cabildo de Gran Canaria, Augusto Hidalgo, “is a failure from every point of view, patent nonsense and a 200 million scam euros” and has warned that his group “will be very attentive” to political corruption that could implicate the municipal company Geursa regarding land exchanges in Tamaraceite Sur, as denounced by the Rehoyas Avanza neighborhood association.
With a much more conciliatory tone, the spokesperson for the PP, Jimena Delgado, intervened, who, after congratulating the new mayoress and her government group, has assured that the popular ones will exercise an elegant, positive and constructive opposition, but also implacable at the time to defend his alternative city model, where, as he has said, all voters who feel orphaned with this new corporation have a place.
Delgado has assured the PSOE, NC and USP that they should see an ally in the PP because it is a party that has always worked with a vocation for public service, which is why it has extended the hand of the popular to “help” the new municipal government to “build” in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria “the best city to live”, an invitation that has been applauded by the public.
For the PP, the priorities to attend to in the city reside in the debt that it has with the neighborhoods, tackling the high levels of poverty, youth unemployment and risk of social exclusion that affect thousands of residents and inaugurating the metroguagua in this mandate, in addition to solving the knots of Belén María or Torre Las Palmas that compromise mobility. EFE