The manifest disagreement between the Popular Party and Vox to reach an agreement that allows the investiture as president of the PP candidate, María Guardiola, opens an unprecedented scenario in Extremadura that also overlaps with the general elections.

What are the deadlines that are now expected in Extremadura?

The president of the Assembly of Extremadura, the socialist Blanca Martín, has a period of 15 days from this Tuesday, June 20, to propose a candidate for the Presidency of the Junta de Extremadura, after consulting the parliamentary groups. Therefore, it counts until July 5 to propose a candidate to preside over the regional Executive. Despite not having the numbers for it (28 deputies from the PSOE plus 4 from Unidas Podemos do not reach an absolute majority by one), Guillermo Fernández Vara announced a few days ago that his intention was to stand for said proclamation. And it gives the impression that the person in charge of the Assembly will allow it and thus take advantage of the media focus already in the electoral campaign of the general elections on July 23.

As established in the Statute of Autonomy of Extremadura, Blanca Martín will propose a candidate for the Presidency of the Board that has “at least a quarter of the members of the Chamber”. María Guardiola could also try it with her 28 deputies and wait for Vox to give her support in one last attempt, which is quite unlikely.. In any case, it has to be decided by the president of the Assembly.

When could the first investiture vote take place in the Assembly?

From those moments, the proposed candidate will present his program to the Plenary Assembly of Extremadura within 15 days following his appointment, and after the corresponding debate, the first investiture vote will take place, something that according to the established calendar , must take place, at the latest, before July 20, three days before the general elections.

In this investiture vote, the candidate must obtain an absolute majority to be proclaimed president of the Junta de Extremadura, and in case this majority is not obtained, a new vote will be taken 48 hours after the first one, in which a majority will be required. simple. So it would be July 21, one day before the general elections.

The procedure may be repeated, with the same or different candidates, “as many times as it deems appropriate” by the president of the Assembly of Extremadura.

When could the new regional elections be held?

If within two months from the first vote none of the candidates has been elected, the president of the Assembly of Extremadura has the power to dissolve the regional chamber and the acting president of the Autonomous Community will proceed to call new elections.. It must also be taken into account that August is usually a non-working day and plenary sessions have never been held in the Extremadura parliament. In any case, the Table of the regional Assembly, which is now dominated by an absolute majority by the PSOE, could declare this month a business day.

If that does not happen, the countdown to the clock for the next elections could start in September and the first dates considered for the possible new elections would be the last week of October and the first of November, according to sources consulted by EL. WORLD. There is a maximum period of 54 days between the dissolution of the chambers and the official call for the new regional elections in Extremadura.

Francisco José Garzón Amo, engineer who on July 24, 2013 was driving the Alvia train that crashed on the outskirts of Santiago leaving 80 dead and 144 injured, has seen how, with a stroke of the pen, he returned to the days after the accident, when all the blame pointed towards him as the only person responsible. After eight months of criminal and civil proceedings, the process began yesterday with the documentation and conclusions process and, surprisingly, the prosecutor in the case decided to withdraw the accusation against the other defendant, the former director of Traffic Safety Adif, Andrés Cortabitarte, and attribute all responsibility to the driver.

In justifying his conclusions, the prosecutor in the case, Mario Piñeiro, pointed out this Wednesday that the telephone call from the controller to the train driver is “the direct cause” of the railway accident.

According to the Prosecutor's Office, the mobile phone call was an “unfortunate” event that caused the driver to neglect his responsibilities and to be completely “abstracted”, losing control of the train, at the entrance of a curve in which he did not slow down.

“That day he made more than careless use of the telephone,” stressed Piñeiro, who considers that this behavior implies “serious imprudence, without the slightest doubt.”

“An Inconsequential Call”

In this way, the focus is once again on an incorrect circulation speed, since the prosecutor does maintain against the driver the same accusation with which the trial began, that he was driving at 199 km/h in a section close to the dangerous curve of To Grandeira, when he answered a call to the corporate mobile, which does not have a hands-free system, made by the controller, speaking for 100 seconds. By responding, he broke “the minimum rules of attention and professionals that are required of him” and, when he finally reacted, he managed to reduce the speed to 179.38 km/h, but it was insufficient to prevent the train from derailing.. According to the prosecutor, “he omitted the slightest attention from his professional duties by remaining attentive to the content of an inconsequential call for the management of the train and the services provided to travelers and dangerously extensive.”

This harsh setback came to Garzón Amo in the first session in which he was present after his statement on October 6 and surrounded by dozens of fellow train drivers, who gathered at the gates of the City of Culture of Galicia to give him their support in a process in which “we believe that in the end he is one more victim” and “he needs to be covered”. In the words of the spokesman for the machinists union (Semaf), Diego Martín, “they feel identified” with him and “we are not going to stop accompanying him in this final stage.”

The former Director of Traffic Safety at Adif, Andrés Cortabitarte. X.Rey EFE

The victims, who bring the accusation both individually and through two associations, do maintain the accusation against Cortabitarte, but, without the weight of the Prosecutor's Office, the driver finds himself in a more complicated situation than when the responsibilities were shared.

Both are being tried for 80 crimes of homicide and 145 of injuries due to serious professional negligence and one of damages for which the parties request four years in prison and disqualification for both while their defenses request their free acquittal and the prosecutor and the attorney for the The State only asks for the conviction of the driver. Faced with the prosecutor's decision to focus on Garzón Amo, the victims' platform believes that Cortabitarte has more responsibility and increases the disqualification requested from four to six years.

The prosecutor, Mario Piñeiro, thus adopts the thesis already supported by the State Attorney's Office, which only accuses the driver. In his new conclusions, he sees that Cortabitarte “in his capacity as security director did not infringe the duty he held” and acted “in accordance with the procedures included in the management system” of Adif, approved by the national authority and with a methodology ” based on European regulations.

The prosecutor's decision “unworthy” of the victims. Its president, Jesús Domínguez, maintains that “there has been nothing in the oral trial to justify it, quite the contrary”, since all the independent experts and Christopher Carr, former head of security for the European Railway Agency, “made it clear that It was necessary to carry out a risk analysis and that, if it had been done, this danger would have been avoided». He understands that the “only explanation” for this change in position is “political” and attributes it to the State Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz, without forgetting former minister José Blanco, whom they accuse of inaugurating the Ourense-Santiago line “in a hurry ».

The Ombudsman will investigate the Generalitat for the survey in which teachers in Catalonia were asked about their linguistic uses in the private sphere. With the survey -revealed by EL MUNDO last February- it was intended to find out if the teachers of the Frederic Mompou Institute, based in the Barcelona town of Sant Vicenç dels Horts, used Catalan in situations unrelated to their educational work, that is, in conversations with your family or friends, when shopping or using your mobile phone.

After receiving a complaint from the Free Teachers Association, which ensures neutrality in teaching, Ángel Gabilondo has decided to “request information from the Department of Education of the Generalitat in order to proceed with a more in-depth study on the matter.”

The complainant entity stressed before the Ombudsman that the survey “clearly transcends the educational and pedagogical field and enters fully into the private and personal sphere” and maintained that, in its opinion, “it violates the fundamental rights to privacy and freedom, at the same time that it constitutes harassment and direct pressure on professionals by their immediate hierarchical superiors». “If we add to this the level of ideologization of the linguistic issue in Catalonia, it is also a direct interference in the political rights and freedoms of the workers surveyed,” he concluded.

«With my family, I usually talk in…», «with friends I usually interact in…», «when I buy in commercial establishments I do it in…», are some of the questions that were asked. The teachers faced each other, who had to clarify whether they use “only Catalan”, “only Spanish”, “more Catalan than Spanish”, “more Spanish than Catalan” or “both languages equally”. The center was also interested in the language in which the members of its faculty have “configured the mobile phone and the APPs” or “in which language they address the administration (town hall, local police or civil guard, courts…) ».

«The educational centers that prepare these unacceptable surveys are the antennas of the Department of Education and are part of the Catalan promotion plan designed by the Government of the Generalitat to linguistically profile teachers, coerce them and eradicate the use of Spanish in educational centers », considers the president of free teachers, Professor Carlos Silva.

The teacher maintains that he is aware that similar surveys are being distributed in other centers where the so-called driving groups for Linguistic Uses in the Educational Field (ULAE) have been created, a plan by the Generalitat to certify the strict use of immersion in all schools in Catalonia after detecting a presumed decrease in its use in schools.

«I have no doubt that the Generalitat will use its usual victimist discourse and deploy its fake repertoire of false good intentions to avoid the interest of the Ombudsman, but the perception of evidence by the latter is too big an accusing finger to be ignored. “, considers.

Anna Simó, the new Minister of Education, who was sentenced for promoting disconnection laws in Parliament, must clarify to Gabilondo the objective of the survey.

Felipe González has confirmed at the last minute his attendance this Tuesday at the presentation of the book by his former minister Virgilio Zapatero in which he evokes Aquel PSOE. The dreams of a generation, and reviews his years of government. Alfonso Guerra, vice president in the executives at the beginning of democracy, has served as master of ceremonies, although both former leaders have avoided greeting each other at least publicly.

In his speech, the former all-powerful number two of La Moncloa did not want to assess the debacle of his party in the municipal and regional elections on May 28: “Perhaps some may think that after going through an electoral process so recently With the result that we know, it would be almost obligatory to say a few words on this subject, but not. Not because we are already on the verge of other legislative elections that will determine which government Spain will have.”

Guerra, however, has implicitly criticized Pedro Sánchez's pacts with Bildu during this legislature. And also that his government delegate in Madrid, Francisco Martínez, said last week that he has done more for Spain in these years than “all the jingoists with their wristbands”, alluding to the PP and Vox. “We have learned these days through the competent authority, as it should be, that those who saved millions of lives during the pandemic were not the toilets, but those who had taken off their ski mask shortly before,” he ironized.

To which he added: “Has Valle-Inclan and his court of miracles returned? No problem, don't despair, our Mélenchon dressed by Christian Dior [implicitly alluding to Yolanda Díaz] who reserved for us the discovery of a Trotskyist will save us at the UN. What other surprises await us? Will we have a small parliamentary group under Putin?”

“If we look we see that everything remains the same. The two great parties turn to their extremes to seek support, thus fattening the parties that are against the model of society that the Constitution describes”, Guerra also lamented in a new cryptic reference to the space located to the left of the PSOE and to Vox , whom he has reproached for being “cheering on the bullfighters” in reference to the vice president that they have appointed for the Valencian Community in their coalition government with the PP, Vicente Barrera.

Other former ministers from the González era were present at the event, such as José Luis Corcuera, Carlos Solchaga and José Barrionuevo, who, when asked if his party needs other leaders, stated that “some things are undoubtedly failing” without going into more details. The only current party official who has attended the presentation at the Francisco Giner de los Ríos Foundation has been Juan Lobato, general secretary in Madrid.

Sumar has withdrawn the head of the list, Aitor Abecia, from his candidacy for the Senate for Álava, upon learning that today he has been tried in Vitoria for a crime of gender violence.

Sources from the Sumar electoral committee in Euskadi have confirmed to EFE that Abecia has already resigned and that now the Álava list will “run” for the Senate, which already included the candidate for mayor of Amurrio on May 28, Leticia Jiménez , from Podemos; and Ester Palacio, from Ezker Anitza-IU.

Abecia, who was listed as “independent”, was Sumar's “star signing” for the Senate in Euskadi, since until this very Saturday he was the mayor of Zambrana representing a neighborhood list of the town that decided not to run again after showing mayor for 16 years.

Abecia's candidacy in Sumar had been publicly known today – the deadline for submitting lists closed at midnight yesterday Monday – so he has been a candidate for less than a day.

The former mayor of Zambrana, who belongs to the independent political platform AIZ, was denounced in 2020 by his ex-partner for an alleged physical assault that would have occurred due to a conflict between the two over the custody of a daughter they have in common.. Abecia had the profile of an independent, denounced irregularities in the plot of the 'Miguel case', which affected the PNV.