The Diplomat
PP, Vox and Ciudadanos have each taken parliamentary initiatives to get the government to officially say it is disassociating itself from the position held by former chief executive José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in support of Nicolás Maduro’s regime on the occasion of the recent elections in Venezuela.
The spokeswoman for the Popular Group in the Congress of Deputies, Cuca Gamarra, yesterday described the elections as an “electoral farce” and announced that they had registered a battery of questions in Congress asking for explanations of the trip by the former president, who went to Caracas as an international observer at the elections to the Venezuelan National Assembly.
He added that his group will request the presence of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya, to find out whether the Spanish government’s position is one of “support” for the actions carried out by Zapatero and what the government’s “official position” is.
Specifically, they asked what the Minister of Foreign Affairs meant by the expression “we must listen carefully to Zapatero about Venezuela” and whether she “approves” of the former President’s actions. Gamarra said they wanted to know whether the executive branch was aware of Zapatero’s trip and to what extent it had received diplomatic support.
Ciudadanos presented a non-legislative proposal for Congress to urge Pedro Sánchez’s government to reject Rodríguez Zapatero’s actions in Venezuela, which in his opinion are aimed at “giving oxygen” to Nicolás Maduro’s regime.
The orange group wants its initiative “for the defence of freedoms and human rights in Venezuela” to be debated in the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Lower House and that the PSOE and Unidas Podemos “should be portrayed when voting,” explained the spokesperson for the party’s executive, Melisa Rodríguez, at a press conference.
Finally, Vox presented another non-legislative proposal to ask for the disapproval of Rodríguez Zapatero, whose attitude towards Venezuela he sees as “shameful,” parliamentary spokesman Iván Espinosa de los Monteros told reporters. Vox also believes that the government is “complicit by omission” in the former president’s statements and asks him to make it clear that his Zapatero does not represent the executive branch or the country.
