Paqui Sánchez and Rafael Peña |
Ceuta/Melilla (EFE).- The 28M elections have different focuses of attention in the autonomous cities of Melilla and Ceuta; in the first the elections will be marked by the scandal of the alleged purchase of votes by mail and in the second it will be necessary to see if the hegemony of Juan Jesús Vivas is maintained, twenty-two years later.
In Melilla, during the campaign, controversy broke out over the alleged attempts to buy votes by mail, an issue present in previous elections, but exacerbated in these, which has given rise to an investigation and unprecedented measures that could be the prelude to a reform of the Electoral Law throughout the country.
And it is that the law determines that the voter by mail must only identify himself when requesting this form of exercising his right to vote and when receiving the electoral documentation, but not at the moment of sending the vote, as all voters do. They go to the polls in person.
This last step is the one that has changed in these elections in Melilla with a resolution of the Zone Electoral Board (JEZ) that the Central Electoral Board extended to all Post Offices in Spain for votes directed to the autonomous city, a measure that the PSOE has already said that it wants to introduce into the Electoral Law through a reform.
More than a fifth of the Melilla electoral census has requested to vote by mail, doubling the registration of the last elections held, the general ones of November 2019, which already broke a record in this regard.
The PP aspires to recover Melilla
In these elections, to which 61,126 people are summoned to the polls -5,939 from abroad-, the PP aspires to recover the Government of Melilla, which it lost in 2019, despite having won the elections with 10 seats, after an agreement between Coalition for Melilla (8), PSOE (4) and Eduardo de Castro, expelled from Ciudadanos two years ago.
Juan José Imbroda, who was president of Melilla between 2000 and 2019, is once again the PP candidate, for the sixth consecutive time, while the Coalición por Melilla (CPM) presents, for the first time since its creation in 1995, a candidate other than the president of the formation, Mustafa Aberchán, who is disabled.
Barely a month ago, CPM revealed that its candidate would be the current Minister of Finance and first vice president of the Assembly, Dunia Almansouri, who is competing at the polls with the current first vice president of local government, Gloria Rojas, candidate of the PSOE.
The Juan Vivas brand
In the other autonomous city, Ceuta, the PSOE and Vox are postulating themselves as the main alternatives to try to end the hegemony of the PP of Juan Jesús Vivas, mayor-president of the city since 2001 and who, with the exception of four years ago, has always won by absolute majority.
Abstention has been one of Ceuta’s chronic problems in both regional and general elections, always hovering or exceeding 40 percent of the global census. On May 28, a total of 63,301 people are called to vote.
The lack of housing due to the small territorial area of Ceuta -with only 19 square kilometers- and the high rate of unemployed with 10,282 unemployed (6,371 of them women) have been two of the aspects that have focused the speeches of the candidates during the Campaign.
The situation of the border with Morocco, as well as the differences between the neighborhoods in the center and the periphery, have also been the subject of debate.
Up to nine parties are presented in Ceuta, some of them for the first time and with hardly any roots in the city as “Libres”, led by Manuel Jesús Vera.
If the PP insists on Vivas, 70, the PSOE has renewed its list and its candidate by betting on the UGT unionist Juan Gutiérrez, who belongs to the Trace municipal cleaning company, where he has the category of driver.
Meanwhile, Vox once again bets on Juan Sergio Redondo Pacheco, doctor in Didactics of Social Sciences from the University of Granada, with the aim of repeating or improving the 6 seats achieved four years ago.
The candidacies also include the local Movement for Dignity and Citizenship (MDyC), led by the lawyer Fátima Hamed, the Ceuta Ya! party, headed by Mohamed Mustafa, Podemos with Ramón Rodríguez as number 1 and Ciudadanos, which is betting again by Javier Vargas Pecharromán.