Alberto Ferreras |
Zamora (EFE).- He is the eternal candidate of the Prepal (Regionalist Party of the Leonese Country). In 1979 he ran for the first time in an election and did so as a candidate for the Senate for a Zamoran localist formation.
It was his best result in a general election, with just over 5,000 votes. From then on he tried his luck with a Leonese regionalist party for which he has headed the list to Congress election after election, always far from getting a seat.
It is already his fifteenth campaign as a candidate for the generals and despite this, Francisco Iglesias Carreño, 78 years old and aspiring to national deputy for the Prepal in Zamora, is aware of his slim chances of being elected, although his candidacy well deserves an award to political perseverance.
He has been waving the banner of Leonism for more than four decades with little electoral success, as shown by the 278 votes he added in the province of Zamora in the last Generals.
“It is not only that the numbers can come out or not, but that we can send the message, with that we are more than satisfied. The presence of Prepal so continuously in the electoral campaigns indicates the persistence and, above all, the tenacity of our group when it comes to facing them”, declares Iglesias Carreño in an interview with the EFE Agency.
This retired physicist and mathematics teacher has more than thirty electoral campaigns behind him as leader of the Prepal, both in national, European, regional and local elections.
Disseminate the ideology
In fact, it is in the statutes of his party to attend all possible elections, regardless of the results, since “going out or not going out is not the most important thing, we believe that the most important thing is to be able to continue disseminating our ideas.”
These principles mean that the Leonese Region, linked to the old Kingdom of León that formed the current provinces of León, Zamora and Salamanca, has its own Statute of Autonomy, without the burden that for it means being linked to Castilla and in particular to the “Centralism of Valladolid” in Castilla y León.
In this regard, he warns of the situation of these three provinces that appear in the statistics in the first places in loss of inhabitants in Spain, with “a depopulation situation that is galloping, that no exit can be seen,” he laments.
Eternal candidate against depopulation and “greedy centralism”
It highlights that all the INE statistics reflect that western Spain, in demographic terms, forms “a pocket of underdevelopment at a European level.”
In the case of the western provinces of Castilla y León, he blames “pucelano centralism, which is voracious for its own youth and captures any sign that we can have here in the three provinces of Leon in order to progress.”
Iglesias Carreño is proud that his party, modest and without dependence on banks for its financing, has a longer run than other formations that had millions of euros in their campaigns and have since disappeared.
Five thousand euros of campaign budget
In the case of Prepal, the budget for the 23-J campaign will barely reach 5,000 euros and will focus its efforts on transmitting its messages through social networks, its website, its Facebook account, with half a thousand followers, and that of Twitter, which is around sixty.
Iglesias Carreño affirms that despite the fact that 44 years have passed since his first elections with Zamoranos for Zamora and 43 since he ran for Prepal, he still feels the urge in his stomach at the beginning of the fifteen days of the campaign because it is “the live sauce of what democracy is, the contrast of opinions, what the debate between all the groups had to be”.
In this regard, he criticizes that it seems that there are only four parties that compete in the elections that are heard in the media and considers that for democracy to be true, all the parties that present ballots must have a voice in the debates.
Remember also that what is elected on 23-J is not the person who occupies the Presidency of the Government but representatives to Congress and the Senate for the different electoral constituencies.
In Zamora’s, the ballot headed by Francisco Iglesias, the ‘other Iglesias’ linked to Zamora, will be at the 369 polling stations in the province, even if there are more ballot boxes than votes he achieved in the last elections. The important thing is to participate. EFE