The PP is selling Menorca to Vox

MinorcaMaite de Medrano, the climate change denier and anti-Catalan Countries councilor for the current Vox party, has sold her defecting but decisive vote to the People's Party (PP) to allow the Menorca Council's budget for next year to be approved again, despite being in the minority. Stripped of her fixed salary from the institution since her party expelled her in May for aligning itself with the dissenting faction, the architect, who boasted of being Vox's 505th member at the national level, has pledged her allegiance to the PP to implement some of the initiatives she says she has been proposing for two years. She now feels "free" to negotiate without being beholden to anyone and knows she holds the key to governability. So, without needing to present amendments or debate it in plenary session, the maverick councilor has guaranteed the budget's approval in exchange for the Popular Party's commitment to promote the use of Castilian Spanish, eliminate websites with the '.cat' domain, and schedule a Hispanic Heritage Week each year to promote Spanish nationalism around October 12th. She also pledges to strengthen the Menorcan language, which, she makes perfectly clear, "is not a historical, cultural, or political appendage of Catalan. The Catalan Countries do not exist. We are simply Menorcans, Balearic Islanders, and Spaniards." Quite a success for a councilor who, in 37 months in office, has barely presented four proposed agreements and who, moreover, was already expelled from the coalition government with the Popular Party with which she began her term. The president dismissed her in October 2023 after she had a falling out with her island director and was accused of harassment. But Adolfo Vilafranca is making a virtue of necessity and, after pretending he could negotiate a stability agreement with the left, has gone straight for De Medrano's support. At stake is the absolute majority, which the polls still deny him and which he needs at the end of each year to pass the budget. This same majority is also essential to promote significant changes to Menorca's model, such as the reform of the Island Territorial Plan (PTI), which is expected to be imminent. In this way, he broadens his support and opens himself up to an ideological sector closer to Vox, the same sector with which current councilor Joan Pons Torres aligned himself, who in 2023 declined to run on lists with other far-right parties in order to join the PP. A strategy that, according to some sources, the conservative party will follow in the 2027 elections.