Once again, José Manuel Baltar Blanco (Ourense, 1967) has given proof of the cunning of his lineage. With a maneuver, he turned the board around to come out reinforced —and rewarded— from a political situation that had become complicated for him, at 215 kilometers per hour in the official car on the A-52, passing through Asturianos (Zamora) on the 23rd. of April. It was not the only time that he made the radar jump on the same route, which had already caught him 54 minutes earlier at 173 km/h in Allariz (Ourense). It means that Baltar traveled a stretch of 140 kilometers in 50 minutes at the wheel of a Volkswagen with many horses that he drove well above the limit of the highway, committing a crime against road safety.
Up to two times he managed to avoid an uncomfortable judgment with the certainty of the radar that hunted him. “It was an oversight”, he justified himself, with strange explanations about what the president of the Ourensano PP was doing on a Sunday in the direction of Madrid in the official car of the Provincial Council without acts on the public agenda. Squeezing the deadlines and with legal delays, he managed to reach the municipal elections on May 28 without having been tried and did not appear electronically before the judge in Puebla de Sanabria until May 31.. Once again, luck fell on his side and the civil servants' strike postponed a hearing that has not yet been held.
With this media uproar and after the puncture of Baltar's PP in the Ourense mayor's office —which his archenemy Gonzalo Pérez Jácome reconquered—, the leadership of the Galician PP forced him to resign from the presidency of the Ourense Provincial Council before going to vote in the past Sunday 23-J, but it was not a free concession. In exchange, José Manuel Baltar has managed to get Alfonso Rueda's PP to propose him as a candidate for the Galician Senate in direct appointment together with the councilor of Ferrol, José Manuel Rey Varela, the only one of the seven Galician cities in the hands of the PP.
The proposal will be made official this Friday the 28th in an extraordinary plenary session of the Galician Parliament, and has a prize for Baltar son, who had already requested his reinstatement in the body of officials of the Xunta to which he belongs. As a popular senator, José Manuel Baltar will have a basic salary of 3,173.83 euros per month in 14 payments, in addition to allowances and other supplements depending on the positions or commissions that he integrates in the Upper House. But the Senate prize comes with the stone: the condition of registered. Implying? That only the Supreme Court will have jurisdiction to judge him. Extra protection for a politician who has already had several setbacks with the Justice, including an investigation for alleged sexual harassment and bribery that was filed and that Baltar described as “blackmail”.
End to 33 years of 'dynasty'
The Baltars, father and son, have been bolted to the command of the province of Ourense for 33 uninterrupted years of Baltarism. Together they took the helm of the Provincial Council under the acronym of the PP, with different styles, but fertilizing the lands of a rural, inland and aging province through nepotism and clientelism that reported them large majorities at the polls..
The first Baltar, the genuine one, was José Luis Baltar Pumar, self-defined as “good cacique”. President of the Provincial Council from 1987 to 2012, he knew how to make Ourense an infallible voting machine for the PP, election after election. Politically incorrect, he used to get into many puddles from which he came out without complexes or major complications until in 2014, already retired from public life, he was sentenced: nine years of disqualification for 104 irregular contracts. That is, for plugging more than a hundred like-minded people into a public institution that it managed as a private company, generating chains of favors that returned in the form of votes..
Ten years earlier, in 2004, he threatened to make water for the PP with a split from the party in Ourense —the rebellion of the little apartment, it was called—. He raised anger in the placid absolute majority of Manuel Fraga, who made Mariano Rajoy sweat cold; nor did he wrinkle before Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who could not break him for years, and opened fronts for him in the war of the mortarboards versus berets of the Galician PP, which pitted the most urban sector against the rural one and from which the Baltars emerged triumphant. He himself prepared his political epilogue —and even a tribute attended by Mario Conde—, but before that he promoted his son to the leadership of the Ourense PP over Feijóo's official candidate: the former mayor of Verín Jiménez Morán.
After 25 years in command, Baltar Sr. had woven the skein necessary for his son to inherit with his own hands the baton of command of the Provincial Council, the public institution from which they controlled the entire province without concealment, giving and removing subsidies, putting and paving roads. A succession worthy of a serial. Three uninterrupted decades in a dynasty that came to an end on June 14.. in the Provincial Council. José Manuel Baltar Blanco still retains the presidency of the PP of Ourense and from his mouth, despite internal pressures, Party sources point out, it has not come out that he will not continue in command: now also as a senator.