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Juan García-Gallardo Frings (Burgos, 1991) did not imagine, six months ago, that he would become the first vice president of Vox in a regional government. With only one year of militancy in the party, he was ‘touched’ by the hand of Santiago Abascal, who made him, by surprise, the candidate for the elections on February 13. Today, this lawyer from Burgos has changed the family office for the seat of government Castilian and Leonese, from where he leads the political project of Vox, supported by three advisers, in the first coalition government between PP and Vox.
-Castilla y León is Vox’s experiment to export to the rest of Spain?
-Castilla y León is not an experiment, but it is the mirror in which the rest of the regions of Spain are going to look to see that the coalition between PP and Vox is the model that we must follow to banish Pedro Sánchez from La Moncloa.
-Andalusia is the next step?
-Yes, but in Andalusia we are not only going to have 17.7% of the votes that we achieved in Castilla y León, but we will also achieve a better result because they have been working there since December 2018 with a team of 12 regional deputies and because the most reliable polls say so.
-Are you the prequel to Macarena Olona, the Vox candidate for the Andalusian Government?
-Macarena is a person with her own abilities and enormous personal merit and political trajectory and there are things that can be inspired by the model of Castilla y León, but she stands on her own. I see her as president of Andalusia, but now Andalusian voters have to see her.
-Will there be the same PP-Vox model in Andalusia as in Castilla y León?
-With one difference, that Juanma Moreno is becoming the face of vice president and Macarena Olona, president of the Junta de Andalucía.
-The Andalusian elections, are they going to be a turning point?
-It will be the occasion to check if the pact model between PP and Vox is consolidated with the new president of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who will have to tell the Spanish if he believes in the possibilities of collaboration between both parties. I believe in it because it is what Spain is expecting from all of us, responsibility and high-mindedness. We must have the capacity for understanding to overcome these differences.
-That collaboration, is it easier now with Feijóo than it was with Casado?
-I see it easier with Feijóo because of Casado’s own words in that National Board of Directors in which he used very thick qualifiers against Vox and because of his words towards our national president during the motion of censure. Feijóo is more cautious and now he will have to demonstrate with his actions if he really believes in these possibilities of collaboration.
-Is Feijóo from the right or from the center?
-We have overcome that dichotomy between right and left. We believe more in the alternative globalism or homeland and we are clear that we are in the homeland.
-Are they condemned to understand each other?
-For now, yes. Later I trust that not, because we will be able to convince a majority of Spaniards and we will not need any other political party. This coalition government in Castilla y León is perhaps the first of many. Kicking Sánchez out of La Moncloa, in the short term, only goes through a PP-Vox agreement. In Castilla y León we have already shown that we have the capacity for understanding, that we are aware of the electoral weight we have and that is why the integrity of Vox’s political program is not applied.
-You are vice-president without portfolio, why have you not wanted to assume a council?
-This is a first coalition government that needed a political leader with three technical advisers who perfectly master the subject over which they are going to govern. Having a portfolio would have prevented me from responsibly exercising that political leadership, which is going to be the main of my duties. But there are others, such as the Administrative Simplification Commission, presiding over the Commissioner for Victims of Terrorism and monitoring compliance with the PP-Vox pact, without forgetting the presidency of the Delegate Commission for Economic Affairs.
-You will also have time to carry the image of Vox throughout the Community, thinking about the municipal elections of 2023.
-The Vox project is solid. We have thirteen prosecutors in the regional courts. There are three directors with their respective teams and it is true that I will be the visible face, but we will share the dissemination of the project among all.
-Why didn’t the Spokesperson of the Autonomous Government want it, as Ciudadanos did in the previous coalition executive?
-We understood that the PP should be the main party in the coalition. It seemed to us an anomaly that the spokesman belonged to the minority.
-In the Junta de Castilla y León, are there two governments or one?
-A single government with unity of action. We will put all our efforts to keep it. We are already having a very intense dialogue, with communication between the president and the vice president, and we are going to put all our efforts to make it work. There is a perfectly oiled machinery with communicating vessels and intense communication.
-In what has Vox yielded to reach the Government of Castilla y León?
– We have yielded fundamentally in programmatic questions. I would have liked to have been able to make the reduction in subsidies to unions more specific. We have left a generic formula for reducing superfluous public spending and now, within the Government, we will have to specify it.
-And the PP, what has it given up?
Vox incorporates the law of domestic violence and, in the case of the Historical Memory decree, approved by the PP, there will be a single concord regulation and a provision will probably be incorporated so that the decree is repealed.
-Do you deny gender-based violence?
I reject all kinds of violence. This Government will fight against any manifestation of violence. What we don’t believe is that there is a specific one motivated by gender. We believe that there are conflicts that give rise to violent episodes. We are going to try to go to the essence, to the origin of the problem to combat it. We are the only country in the world with regulations like this, in which specific courts are created to try men.
-Can the Law on Gender Violence, which already exists, and the Law on Domestic Violence that Vox proposes coexist?
-At the regional level, aid given to victims is mainly regulated. What we have agreed upon is a domestic violence law that equates all aid so that an orphan of a father does not have less aid than an orphan of a mother. In its current conception, we have agreed that the other law remains.
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George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism