The Diplomat
The delegation of ten PP MPs expelled from Venezuela, yesterday in Madrid, accused Pedro Sánchez’s Government of sharing the speech of the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, and considered it “extremely serious” that the former president of the Government, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, “lends himself to giving a democratic appearance to something that does not have one.”
Upon their arrival at Barajas airport from Caracas, the MPs described it as “regrettable and worrying” that the Government shares, in their opinion, Maduro’s speech. In addition, they described Zapatero as “an accomplice of the Chavista regime.” “He is not attending as an observer because yesterday, when he could have been at the Caracas airport defending the entry of representatives of the Spanish, he did not do so,” they denounced.
The deputy secretary general of the PP, Esteban González Pons, criticized the fact that the Spanish Government did not attend on Friday to “protect nine of its compatriots subjected to the arbitrariness of a dictatorial power” and said that “the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is wrong to take the side of Maduro.” For this reason, he believes that the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, should “rectify immediately,” reports Europa Press.
González Pons said that, in the office where they were deported, they demanded that Zapatero appear as an international observer and that the response they received was that the former Spanish president had “better things to do.”
For his part, the spokesman for the ‘popular’ parliamentary group in Congress, Miguel Tellado, defended that the work of this delegation was not to participate in an observation mission, but rather to “accompany” to the candidacy of the Democratic Unitary Platform of Venezuelan politicians Edmundo González and María Corina Machado, which is running as the opposition to President Nicolás Maduro in the elections that the country will hold this Sunday.
“Our job was not to participate in an observation mission, but to accompany a candidacy that fights for democracy in a sister country like Venezuela,” explained Tellado.
González Pons specified that three different delegations were attending – one from the European Parliament, another from the Congress of Deputies and a third from the Senate of Spain – invited as companions by the Venezuelan opposition.
“The Senate’s was an official trip approved by the board of the Senate of Spain and therefore should have had special protection from the Spanish authorities both in Venezuela and in Madrid. The mission of the European Parliament and that of the Congress of Deputies were private missions of the Popular Group,” said the deputy secretary general.
According to the PP, all the delegations wrote to Foreign Affairs, to the Spanish ambassador in Caracas, and to the Venezuelan ambassadors in Brussels and Madrid, informing them that they had been invited as companions, but that “they received refusals to travel as observers.” “We do not have a written order of deportation, no document telling us that we are deported, nor the reasons or the causes. The decision has been absolutely arbitrary,” he added.
Tellado believes that this weekend a “transition towards a real democracy” can begin in Venezuela, where, according to the PP, “unfortunately today there is no real democracy.”
“It is a formal democracy because Venezuelans are called to the polls, but it is not a real democracy. And proof that it is not a real democracy is that we have been expelled from the country. In no other democratic country would the democratic representatives of another state be expelled, but in Venezuela they would be. A democracy is not just putting the ballot boxes every four, five or six years,” he argued upon his arrival at Barajas.
Instead, he said that a real democracy is “much more” than putting up ballot boxes to hold a “mock election” and that it requires a series of formal elements and guarantees during the process, guarantees that have not been given in Venezuela, he said.
