Speak out but watch your step

JUAN PEDRO YLLANES, a judge by profession, is on voluntary leave because he is also a Podemos MP.

Yllanes complained not long ago that the party’s co-founder Juan Carlos Monedero threatened him for backing Iñigo Errejon, the Podemos number two currently at loggerheads with party supremo Pablo Iglesias.

This internal crisis is due to peak during the party conference in February and Mondero warned Yllanes that until then he can say things which he disapproves of “but be careful afterwards.”

When this became public knowledge, Monedero denied threatening Yllanes, claiming “a misunderstanding.”

Both men have talked since then and agreed to let it drop, but as anti-capitalist Monedero was economical with the truth in the past over his undeclared Venezuela earnings, why believe him now?  

Friendly fire

FORMER president Jose Maria Aznar resigned as honorary president of the Partido Popular not long after his think-tank, Faes, had detached itself from the party.  

He wants more independence, Aznar said, meaning freedom to criticise the party and Mariano Rajoy whom he appointed as his successor.

The current president was supposed to win the March 2004 elections so that the government could continue under Aznar’s tutelage.  Instead Rajoy lost then and again in 2008.

When he finally came to power he and all but a few PP hardliners disappointed the former president. Party insiders admitted that Aznar’s news came as a relief although that could be short-lived because the sniping won’t stop and friendly fire is about to begin.

Pole position

PABLO IGLESIAS and Iñigo Errejon are struggling to decide which direction Podemos should take. Former television pundit Iglesias meanwhile showers Errejon with flowery phrases containing an eloquent and ominous subtext. “You are one of the most brilliant and talented people I have ever known and I want you at my side, not in front of me,” Iglesias recently simpered.  In fact he wants Errejon behind him, where he can neither cast a shadow nor stab him in the back.

A question of values

SOME PP politicians would like to remove the phrase that confirms the party’s commitment to ‘values of Christian humanism’ from its statutes.  They were unsuccessful as would expected in a party where the former Interior minister Jorge Fernadez Diez awarded the Police Medal of Merit to La Virgen de los Dolores.