Olona and Echenique avoid uncomfortable questions by facing journalists in Congress

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Two of the main groups of the Congress of Deputies, and two of their main representatives, starred on Tuesday in two separate episodes of confrontations with the media. And it rains on wet. Vox and Podemos once again made the pointing out and the clash with journalists, and their contempt for them, a sign of their way of doing politics.

Just when the informants are recovering physical space in the headquarters of popular sovereignty, after the restrictions that the pandemic has imposed in the last year, the representatives of the media were faced with other problems unrelated to health measures. Those derived from attitudes such as those shown by the general secretary of Vox, Macarena Olona, and the spokesperson for United We Can, Pablo Echenique.

The first faced a journalist in the mythical ‘M-30’, the corridor that surrounds the Hemicycle, to hug her in front of all the cameras, in an attitude that seemed spontaneous but was actually more measured and later cheered by her colleagues of party in the networks. The second was allowed, in the main press room of the building that houses the Spanish Parliament, right next to a corridor in which great parliamentary chroniclers of our press are honored as Josep Pla, Julio Camba or Wenceslao Fernández Florez, say who is or is not a journalist.

Both used these tricks to avoid thorny issues. Olona stole explanations about the fact that one of the deputies under her command, Jose Maria Sanchez Garcia, would have insulted during the plenary session, calling her a “witch”, the socialist deputy Laura Berja |.

Echenique avoided commenting on the presence in Spain of ‘Pollo Carvajal’, the former head of the Venezuelan secret services of Hugo Chavez, a circumstance that reopens suspicions about the financing of the purple formation.

Pablo Echenique, in Congress.

Pablo Echenique, in Congress.

EFE

The purple spokesman had been asked by Josu Bárcenas, from the YouTube channel Estado de Alarma. Echenique not only refused to answer but also denied his interlocutor’s status as a journalist, stating that answering him would be “disrespectful” for the rest of the informants who were in the press room.

Faced with this situation, the political correspondent of Onda Cero, José Ramón Arias, left his study towards the press room, asked to speak and demanded that Echenique answer his partner’s question. Something that the spokesman for United We Can, in the face of the performance of one of the most veteran parliamentary journalists in Spain, did, ensuring that everything responds to “information from the sewer.”

“Witch”

The afternoon plenary session was immediately marked by the incident involving the Vox deputy, Jose Maria Sanchez Garcia, expelled from the session by the vice president of the Lower House, the socialist Alfonso Gómez de Celis (who at that time was replacing the president Meritxell Batet) after his insult to the deputy Berja. The parliamentarian defended at that time from the speakers’ platform the position of her group to introduce in the Penal Code the criminalization of harassment of women who go to clinics for the voluntary interruption of pregnancy.

Deputy Sánchez, supported as could be seen by the leadership of his parliamentary group, clung to his seat, refusing to leave the plenary session, despite the fact that Gómez de Celis had given him the three warnings that, according to the Regulations, entail expulsion.

Finally, the plenary session continued after being suspended for ten minutes, and the Vox parliamentarian, after the presidency had requested it again, retracted his insult, albeit half, saying that “I withdraw that I have called her a witch.” Hours later, on Twitter, the socialist Berja said “we are the granddaughters of the witches that you could never burn” and asserted that “the defense of women’s rights there is no macho insult to stop it.”

Although what happened within the session ended up giving rise to the incident outside of Olona with the press. The leader of the party led by Santiago Abascal first attended to the media in the hall, where she criticized the actions of the vice president of Congress, whom she accused of not having “applied the Regulation correctly” since, in her opinion, “it is interpreted flexibly” when, he said, it is the Vox deputies who receive insults.

But when asked what he thought about his colleague’s invective in particular, he thanked the journalists and ran away, something common within the give and take of politicians and journalists. Just minutes later, as is also customary, Olona returned to the Hemicycle and met the journalists again. Then, La Sexta reporter, Cristina Pérez, reiterated her question about the fact that a Vox deputy had called a socialist a “witch”.

Olona, ​​who had entered with a person from her team who was recording her with her mobile phone before the incident occurred, passed by one of the side corridors, but a few seconds later she turned to face the journalist, at the one that, tuting her and in an angry tone, snapped at her in the form of a rhetorical interrogation: “Have you asked this same question when they attacked me, in this Congress of Deputies and in this plenary session, calling me a fascist, at this distance and at risk of aggression? I am asking you directly, I want an answer: yes or no “. The journalist replied that “I am the journalist, Mrs. Olona.” The deputy of Vox, affirmed then that “you do not want to answer me, your silence is very eloquent” and returned to get lost in the corridor.

The Vox networking team, always on the move, did not take long to publicize the incident. “Macarena leona is much more Macarena” the Vox spokesperson proudly tweeted, Ivan Espinosa de los Monteros. Olona had referred to the “fascist” insult that, recently, during a plenary session, very close to her seat, an ERC deputy.

The vice secretary of Communication of the PP, Pablo Montesinos, who in the morning had condemned Echenique’s attitude, towards the same later with that of Olona. “Always in defense of freedom of information. Enough of intimidating or pointing out journalists. One and the other” affirmed the also deputy for Malaga. The PSOE parliamentary spokesman, Héctor Gómez, appeared in the courtyard of Congress late in the afternoon to denounce the “unprecedented verbal aggression” suffered by the deputy of his group.

Podemos, which has been in institutions for almost five years more than Vox, has already accumulated several episodes of this type. In March 2017, when the purple party was led by Pablo Iglesias and it was the third force in Congress, still ruling Mariano Rajoy, the Madrid Press Association (APM) issued a harsh statement supporting several professionals (most of them women) who had reported feeling harassed by the Podemite leadership.

“Considering the testimonies and documentary evidence provided by these journalists, the APM demands that Podemos stop once and for all the systematized campaign of personal and network harassment that it has been carrying out against professionals from different media, which it intimidates and intimidates. he threatens when he disagrees with his information “said one of the fragments of that communiqué that already raised a lot of dust.

A year earlier, several journalists got up from an act by Iglesias at a university and a writer confronted him after he tried to discredit, making fun of university students, one of the editors who was incidentally covering the information from Podemos . Vox, for its part, has vetoed various media at press conferences and expelled from their professional groups, including EL ESPAÑOL.



Reference-www.elespanol.com

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