Following the latest ordinary plenary session, where the budget for 2024 was approved, and the extraordinary session held afterward that approved subsidies for Alicante’s municipalities for the current year, this Wednesday the Alicante Provincial Council holds the ordinary plenary meeting for March. The commemoration of International Women’s Day, the absence of auditors within the provincial institution with four of its eleven top officials currently on leave, and protests by the agricultural sector will mark a session slated to take place at noon in the palace on Avenida de la Estación.
The observance of International Women’s Day arrives amid clear division among the groups represented in the Provincial Council, a split intensified by Vox’s stance. The ultra-right party presents its own motion, while the other three groups, the Popular Party, PSPV-PSOE, and Compromís, present a joint text. “We unite to reaffirm our commitment to gender equality and to the empowerment of women in the province,” reads the statement signed by the three parties.
Meanwhile, Vox’s motion targets the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, and the Vice President Yolanda Díaz, accusing them of having seriously harmed women in the area of security. It references the “only yes is yes” law and claims that “126 rapists, pedophiles, and sexual criminals” have benefited from it. Vox also notes that “under guardianship in the Community of Valencia” have been “abandoned by the Socialist Party,” alluding to the case that led to the resignation of the vice president of the Botànic government Mónica Oltra.
Aside from Vox’s difference of view on International Women’s Day, the PSPV will bring a motion to this Wednesday’s plenary denouncing that the lack of auditors at the Provincial Council is affecting the province’s smaller municipalities, since the institution provides this service to them. The socialists claim that this situation harms municipalities, especially when applying for subsidies.
Finally, the protests carried out by farmers in recent weeks will also have repercussions in the plenary through two motions, one from the PP and another from Vox. The Populars urge the Sánchez government to invest in the modernization and improvement of irrigation and to ask the EU to relax its rules. The Vox group, for its part, attacks the ambitions of the Agenda 2030.