The great cohabitation of Ceuta, where PP and PSOE do put an end to the extreme right
Juan Vivas won the 2019 elections in Ceuta with his most pyrrhic victory (nine seats). He was the first to digest the doubts that today assail the PP at the national level. At the head of a hegemonic party, which in 2007 and 2011 garnered two out of three votes and up to 19 out of 25 deputies, the last elections left the president of the city facing a parliamentary puzzle that forced him to reach agreements with the socialists (seven), who in 2001 had boosted him to office with a State Pact to unseat the GIL, or with Vox (six), since localism (MDyC, two; and Mackerels, one) was left without the ability to articulate majorities.
To do? Explore a great cohabitation with the PSOE under penalty of not being understood by his hosts or ally with those chosen by those who previously voted for him, Vox? Vivas has tried everything: he first governed with the support of the Socialists for six months, then supported himself for a year on the extreme right and now faces the final stretch of the legislature again with those of Pedro Sánchez. He has promised not to stand in the 2023 elections (not all his followers believe it), but in his closest circle of collaborators he takes it for "sure" that, if he or his line of political action continues, "he will never" return with the of Abascal.
That Ceuta is the only autonomy where popular and socialists govern, a "complicated" pact for both parties when they make electoral calculations, is possible thanks to time (to taste trial and error), to the will of their local leaders (who submit their personal strategy to consider the city a “state affair”), to the idiosyncrasy of its traditional cadres and bases (where ideology is diluted in pragmatism) and to the complicity of Genoa and Ferraz. "Here we have many particularities that make it more feasible," says the Deputy Secretary of Programs of the local PP and Minister of Education, Carlos Rontomé.
In reality, Vivas saw Vox coming. During the 2019 campaign he gave his word that he would not agree with the extreme right or with the localists closest to Podemos. "We don't want to know anything about them," he said, because they are "dangerous" for the coexistence of a city whose population is divided equally between Christian-Westerns and Arab-Muslims with two communities with great socioeconomic weight, the Jewish and the Hindu.
The PP came out of the polls touched and the socialists reinforced, determined to finish mobilizing and conquering what is sociologically presumed to be their class electorate, the Muslim population, which concentrates the highest rates of unemployment, poverty and school failure and dropout, which during years he had taken refuge in localism.
What was expected came out. The first PP-PSOE agreement was forged in exchange for a General Directorate of Neighborhoods for the socialists, a handful of eventuals and the Management of regional radio and television, but it only lasted half a year. "You agreed to something one afternoon and the next morning they said it was not worth it," they remember in the popular Executive. In September, the refusal of those of Vivas to change the work calendar agreed for 2020, which, without Easter at the end of Ramadan as the second Islamic holiday (since 2010 it is the Sacrifice), demanded by the socialists, ended up bringing the PP to Vox, “ideologically more natural” allies, according to Rontomé.
Not even the storm unleashed by the leaking of the Islamophobic messages that the far-right leaders crossed in their internal WhatsApp groups shipwrecked their approach, although Vox left two deputies in the cathole who went on to the condition of unassigned frightened by the true character , which they supposedly did not know, from their peers. Vox claimed for its 'number 3', the national police officer Francisco José 'Pachi' Ruiz, the well-paid First Vice Presidency of the Governing Board of the Assembly and, like the Socialists, the helm of RTVCE.
On December 23, 2019, the ultra spokesman, Carlos Verdejo, proclaimed the beginning of his era in the institution: Santiago and Ceuta closes. “These Budgets”, he said unleashing a monumental anger, “are only the beginning of a new stage; the end of the beach bars; the purge of the socialists, a criminal party since its founder". "Vivas thought that the rest of the Vox leaders were like Chema [José María Rodríguez, uno de los electos que abandonó el partido]thorough although 'very right-wing', recalls a friend of the president, "but he was wrong: when the intrinsic Islamophobia of this extreme right appears here it cannot be peaceful."
The PP began to fall off the horse (“we will all pass through there, it is very difficult to endure a legislature with Vox because they are extremely radical and make politics in unreality as when it announces demolishing the autonomies”, they warn Castilla y León from Ceuta) when, On February 28, 2020, 40 social entities took more than 6,000 people into the streets "against racism and inequality" and "for coexistence" to demand the PP in one of the largest mobilizations in the recent history of the city to break up with Vox shouting 'I am Spanish, Spanish, Spanish'. “Your policies of hatred”, laments Rontomé, “have permeated and generated a social tension that has not been seen here since the eighties [cuando los españoles musulmanes no tenían ni DNI]breaking the great legacy of Vivas, which is beyond material development, cohesion over our differences”.
Before sitting down again, the PP and Vivas himself were, in July of that same year, about to die with the same iron that they had used to put an end to the GIL, that of a motion of censure whose political justification would have been, precisely, to remove from the “fascists” any capacity to influence the government. The Socialists tried to unite all the others and find a PP token that would knock Vivas down. On the 27th, with all the lights on the Muslim advisers and the Government about to burst, the Social Affairs officer, Dunia Mohamed, denied in a very short video that she was going to sign a motion of censure.
The current general secretary of the PSOE of Ceuta, Juan Gutiérrez, who was then 'number 2', opened the way for dialogue: "People, many people from the Muslim community, but also countless Christians, asked me on the street , 'take these people away', and I started talking to Kissy [Chandiramani, consejera de Hacienda] to find a way to understand each other again to separate the extreme right and its two local leaders, who do not value this city as it is”, he alludes in statements to elDiario.es.
The member of the Government recalls that "I took the reins of the Treasury just before the declaration of the state of alarm and in April we presented a lot of support to cover the health, social and economic needs of the city with the aim of achieving the greatest number of possible support, but Vox was determined not to help anything that had to do with the Muslim community, something we do not share. “Those prerogatives”, she warns, “were unbearable”
“I am afraid that these people may one day govern this city: they would not only endanger our existence as a society but also relations with Morocco, and the president also says so, so we chose to take off our jacket. party and put on that of the citizen out of responsibility and loyalty with Ceuta and with the people of Ceuta”, summarizes the socialist, who in November surrounded himself with a Regional Executive that is a faithful sociological reflection of the local demography.
According to Gutiérrez, in Ferraz he never found any reluctance to agree with the PP: "They have always told me and let me go ahead with this bet: without asking for positions, for social policies and investments and in favor of the less favored... This that we are doing is good for Ceuta, for the Assembly and for everyone”, he defends.
Nor did the popular people of Ceuta find reticence in Genoa, despite the fact that the right-wing media have striven to turn Vivas into a traitor to the country due to his institutional loyalty. Rontomé, "ex-friend" of the leader Vox in Ceuta and now a regular target of his thickest insults, summarizes why the right-wing alliance broke up: "We confirm that they are pursuing the civil and social elimination of part of the Ceuta population, of coexistence as factor of cohesion in our society… Theirs are colonial policies in which there are settlers and a population that must adapt to them, eliminate any identity trait by laminating the concept of citizenship… He did not want to end subsidies, but rather aid to certain communities, especially any that alluded to the Muslim or to coexistence”, he summarizes. From the point of view of Gutiérrez “Vox has made the PP of Ceuta good and in this position we socialists do not vote in its favor, but rather what is good for Ceuta, whether it costs us more or less, because we are not here to block, but to the contrary”.
Vivas and Gutiérrez disagree ("we have ideological differences, many", they affirm in both parties) they see each other at least every seven days and maintain a Follow-up Commission of their agreement that meets "monthly" to ensure compliance with the agreements reached on this year's budget. The model is beeping, but on the horizon it is intuited that, sooner or later, to face the 2023 elections, a more or less agreed rupture will have to take place, but still without a date.
Be that as it may, although no one wants to give voice to the statement, it is considered "sure" on both sides that if one of the two major nationally established parties wins the upcoming elections, the City Government, which functions as any council, will be in the hands of the winner with the support of the other. The only unknown in this regard hangs on the result of the PP Congress, which will be attended by Vivas and his former Minister of Health, the doctor Javier Guerrero, who had to resign at the beginning of 2021 after learning that he had been vaccinated ahead of time against COVID-19 and that he is so sure of his pull that he has already said that if he cannot do it with those acronyms, he will present himself with those of his own party.
The doctor is embraced by the faction of the current PP (almost without representatives in the Executive) more in favor of aligning himself with Vox, although believers germinate around Vivas in a third way that would go through convincing Abascal to sideline his local leaders, increasingly confronted with everything and everyone once according to Rontomé "they have shown their cards" calling the Muslim Spaniards "pro-Moroccans", but with no visible internal alternative.
