Objective Irene Montero: the eternal campaign of the extreme right against the Minister of Equality

A day later, and in an item on the agenda related to the abolition of pimping in which the minister did not participate, the extreme right returned to the fray. “From her government they are inducing to practice sex with minors. The hypersexualization that they are promoting to raise the sexual instinct in immature ages is having tremendous effects such as addiction to pornography, which is beginning to be consumed from the age of eight. Cease Minister Montero”, said the deputy of Vox Lourdes Monasterio.

Santiago Abascal’s party has even announced that it will take this last chapter of its eternal campaign against Montero to the Supreme Court to file a complaint for corruption of minors. They take this step after the manipulation in networks of some words of the minister during an appearance in which she defended the right of children to receive sexual education: “All boys, girls and children in this country have the right to know their body, to knowing that no adult can touch their body if they don’t want to and the right to love or have sexual relations with whoever they want, based on consent”. No one on the committee used their turn to reply to make the minister’s intervention ugly, which everyone seemed to understand. The representatives of Vox did not even reply. Until the campaign began on social networks.

Several accounts linked to the extreme right accused Montero of haranguing pedophilia and soon the invented controversy jumped into the courtyard of Congress. “This is the most serious thing that has been said in this Parliament,” the spokesman for the extreme right, Iván Espinosa de los Monteros, told the press. But, like so many times, the campaign generated in the heat of the extreme right ended up spreading like an oil stain that permeates the discourse of other parties.

And so, behind Vox were the PP and also Ciudadanos. Conservative deputy Carmen Navarro described Montero’s words as “barbaric”: “He is not aware of the scope of what he has said, we ask him to reflect and resign.” The leader of Ciudadanos, Inés Arrimadas, continued: “Hours go by and Irene Montero still does not rectify these intolerable words. Someone like that cannot be a minister of the Government of Spain. One more reason to be fired.”

For days, the latest controversy induced about the Minister of Equality became a real campaign of harassment on social networks, with insults and accusations of all kinds: “Irene Montero with pederasty”, “You impose absolute violence on that sacred strip what is childhood”, “Pederast!”, “Go now, pedophile!”, “Pedophiles to the rope”, can be read in any of the responses to the tweets of the also leader of Podemos. Something that, of course, is not new.

In recent months, Montero has mounted campaigns of this type on at least two more occasions. For example, other manipulated statements of his about the death of dozens of people near the Melilla fence due to the actions of the Moroccan police went viral. Asked about this, the minister was blunt: “We think these are unbearable and terribly painful events and we think that what needs to be an independent investigation to clarify what has happened.”

However, another twitter account cut those words and published a montage that conveyed the feeling that Montero was making a fool of himself and was rooting in absurd phrases so as not to criticize what happened. A montage that many media outlets reproduced after accepting it as good, once again opening the chapter of public ridicule of the leader of Podemos.

A few weeks later, the minister flew to the United States with part of her ministerial team on a work trip. Montero uploaded a photo to social networks with her companions in New York, another occasion used by her extreme right to extend her obsessive campaign against her. “La Moncloa confirms that it is not an official trip and that is a crime of embezzlement of public funds,” another ultra profile lit the fuse.

The false message spread like wildfire on Telegram, Twitter or Facebook and the umpteenth pre-cooked controversy raged for days. It was a lie that Moncloa confirmed such a thing. In fact, it did just the opposite and published the minister’s official agenda in detail: institutional meetings with representatives of the White House, the State of New York or the UN, and interviews with representatives of organizations such as the Center for Reproductive Rights, the organization Human Rights Campaign or Outright Action International.

But the line between what turned out to be false and true was also not a reason for contention for the political right on that occasion. “It’s a pose groupies in Times Square, totally free vacations” affirmed the general coordinator of the PP, Elías Bendodo. His classmate Cuca Gamarra described it as “an end-of-year trip for teenagers.” A few months before, the Madrid president Isabel Díaz Ayuso, also on an institutional trip, had been photographed in that same place, although in that case the photo did not generate any controversy.

“Disciplining” political harassment

Is it, therefore, something similar to a political obsession with Montero? The feminist sociologist Cristina Hernández is clear that it is a discourse of political violence designed with very specific objectives. “It’s disciplinary. It is not a day that someone has had enough with her, it is a defined strategy of harassment and personal demolition that seeks to destroy her politically, ”she affirms.

Hernández remembers how in her day the also Minister of Equality, Bibiana Aído, suffered a campaign of harassment that even organized escraches for her family or distributed fetuses with her name for defending the abortion law. “That was personal harassment, like the one suffered by Irene Montero’s children at the door of her house. And that is not political criticism, it is an attempt at personal destruction with a dissuasive moral: what woman wants to be Minister of Equality seeing what happens to them? ”, She asks herself.

One of the women who works in the Department of Equality is Isa Serra, who believes that these campaigns of “political violence” do not focus on women like Irene Montero by chance. She “she is young, female, feminist and from Podemos. And they apply that violence against those who have the capacity to apply changes that leave behind a patriarchal model of living, ”she says.

Serra believes that the words of the minister in Congress asking to stop the extreme right are a wake-up call against normalization. “It’s amazing that so many people buy into her twist of words. There is a huge risk of tolerance and normalization of this harassment, but I think we are winning”, she says before warning that, “no matter how much they attack Irene, she is going to continue approving feminist policies and they are not going to be able to stop it”. What seems clear, according to the precedents, is that they will try again indefinitely.