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Julián Nieva was re-elected mayor of Manzanares on May 28, with an absolute majority. It will be his third term. On an electoral night of municipal shocks for the PSOE, his victory came to soften some results for his party colleagues in Ciudad Real that have ended up turning in many towns to the right. To a large extent with PP-Vox pacts, including the city of Puertollano, in which the left had historically won in the last 44 years.
When we ask him how he lived the night of 28M, he gives us a bittersweet feeling. For his team “the electoral result was absolutely fantastic.” He believes that “it reflects the political reality in which Manzanares finds itself. We are a city that has very positive indicators from the economic point of view and the management has been valued upwards.”
That is where the electoral result is framed despite, he says, the attempt “especially by the PP, that the campaign not revolve around what matters to the citizens. Unfortunately in other places they managed not to talk about the municipal or the regional”.
Ciudad Real, Puertollano, Tomelloso, Socuéllamos… or the Provincial Council had socialist governments and now they are right-wing. Did the public want change?
No, I think not. To this day I even think that many citizens have not understood what has happened and probably the reflection was made after the fact. That is perhaps the big problem we have in Spain and in other European countries: reflections cannot be made after voting, but rather beforehand.
Anyone who wants to vote for populism should do so, but assume it. What is not worth it is to vote and then say: “I didn’t think we were going to lose the Provincial Council!”. Some could not imagine it in a context of regional and municipal elections, where the management had been extraordinary, with indicators that Castilla-La Mancha is now a much better community and with cities like Puertollano, Tomelloso or La Solana where the work that has been done is very, very valuable.
I believe that an appeal must be made for the 23rd of July. It is not understandable that this has happened with minimal effort, with inexperienced candidacies, with politicians who do not know what they will give of themselves and in some cases with PP-Vox coalitions.
The danger of involution is real. There will be cities that will have a serious setback and Manzanares is an exceptional event if we put it in this context.
And what is your formula for that “exceptional event”?
Management like that of Manzanares has surely been in other locations. Positive economic indicators maybe too, but what I think we have achieved is to isolate the debate from what was not important and focus it on what really mattered.
We could not allow people to talk about Bildu or other things that had nothing to do with Manzanares, but important things like the unemployment rate in our city, economic activity and companies, photovoltaic solar energy projects… In short, everything that makes us a reference.
I also value the result in a positive way because arithmetically it is, with 54% of the votes among five candidates. We have obtained one of the best results in the province and the region among populations of relative importance. I think we were right in the strategy of not taking us to a debate that was not the one that was legitimately on the table.
Exceptionally, we have held five political acts in a city like ours and we managed to gather more than 2,000 people. It was not worth with the classic meeting two days before. Later, I think we had solvency based on the trajectory and image of the mayor’s office and the government team as a whole that the citizens have valued.
Manzanares has a transversal vote and there are people from the center, with an ideology that has nothing to do with the PSOE and who have given us their support because they know that the management is unbeatable.
Vox enters Manzanares for the first time and has positioned itself as the third most voted force. How do you interpret it?
It went in very fairly. I interpret it in a general way: there is no reflection when voting for Vox. I think that there are certain citizens that we also have to address because they have probably taken the Vox ballot without thinking much about what was happening.
The 5.6% of the vote for Vox is lower than in other localities, but I do interpret it as a danger in the general context. It is very transversal and many layers of the population are taking that ballot because populist discourses are bought. Then comes regret. That danger lies ahead of July 23.
It is necessary to make a pedagogical effort and explain that what happens in the daily reality of the citizen has a lot to do with the progressive policies that have been made.
Are you now afraid that this involution of which you speak could occur in the Ciudad Real Provincial Council, which, predictably, PP and Vox will govern?
In the best of cases there will be a setback. At worst, a regression if they did not know how to interpret that the Provincial Council is a body that has to assist the entire province of Ciudad Real, as has been done under the Presidency of José Manuel Caballero.
We are 102 towns and three smaller entities. The policies that have been made by the Diputación are very little improvable because all the needs of a province like ours with more than 20,000 square kilometers have been covered. It is the third largest in Spain. It has national parks, an exceptional tourism project, with innovative programs, with projects to fight depopulation…
560 million euros have been invested in four years and we have been able to reach the last corner. The Provincial Council has been won by the PSOE, but I am afraid that the PP-Vox pact will make others govern.
We must assume the democratic reality of the pacts, but also the danger: we do not know what the extreme right is capable of giving of itself. What we do know is what the PP can do without Vox. We found out about it in 2011 and we had the biggest policy of cuts in the history of democracy.
And now for 23J the PP does not say what it is going to do. It only puts us in the position of Pedro Sánchez or Spain. But what are we talking about? Pedro Sánchez and Spain are the same. Like Julián Nieva and Spain are the same. What needs to be put on the table are electoral programs and then… comply with them.
Today we no longer talk about electoral programs…
But what is it that in Spain the rights of women have been recognized in all areas, those that they legitimately have: caregivers who were not entitled to Social Security, domestic workers who today are entitled to unemployment benefits, to pensioners, only in Ciudad Real more than 100,000 have had a rise of more than 8.5% and it is a historical figure. Non-contributory pensions 15%. Or the scholarships for young people…
It seems incredible that in 2023 we are talking about whether equal rights between men and women is possible. It is an absolute offense to the system. It is inadmissible. We must avoid a setback in rights and freedoms, especially of a social nature.
I am convinced that what the PP has proposed for this country are cuts in rights and more with Vox. It must be made clear that rights are not eternal. They are kept until someone else comes and takes them away.
You are a candidate for the Senate for the PSOE on July 23. I don’t know if it is a challenge to ‘replace’ a historical figure in the Upper House such as the mayor of Valdepeñas, Jesús Martín, who has said that it will be his last term as mayor. The Senate should be a benchmark for autonomous communities and municipalities…
For me it is an honor that my party does me and a responsibility. I’ll be up to it. For eight years I have been a provincial deputy and I am adapted to combining the mayoralty with other important political responsibilities. I can afford it thanks to the magnificent government team that I have.
I want to show that the Senate is a useful Chamber, very useful. Another thing is that sometimes they try to consider the opposite. Manzanares and the province of Ciudad Real have important projects and we are going to fight them. I don’t want it to be considered a parting gift, but rather a fighter willing to fight those battles and win them is sent to Madrid.
But are you telling me these are your last four years in politics?
(Laughter) No, no. What I am saying is that the person who is sent to Madrid is a tireless worker, with the capacity to carry out projects.
What will be your main objective in the electoral campaign?
I would like to be able to export the same thing that we have done in Manzanares. And that is that citizens focus the debate and know what we are talking about.
I believe that the progressive vote must be grouped and I know that this has always come. With all due respect to all the progressive organizations that are not the PSOE, in a province like ours the Socialist Party is the only one that gets representation.
The division of the vote harms the result. Historically it has been called ‘appealing to the useful vote’, but it either is, or it doesn’t work. Every time we practice more pragmatism when voting and happily less dogmatism. That seems to me very healthy intellectually speaking. My mission will be pedagogy and in each place where I have to speak, I will try to focus on reality: I will tell the citizen that the Minimum Interprofessional Salary was 735 euros and now it is more than 1,000. Or that pensions were never raised by 8.5% before, in a country with 10 million pensioners.
And if I were a woman, I could not vote for those who still ask if women are equal to men. And if I were a worker, I could not vote for a political organization that, at least, does not defend that my minimum wage is 1,080 euros.
You have started a campaign to encourage people to vote by mail. The date of 23J does not help…
It doesn’t help, but I am convinced that there is a battle. And the decision is correct because waiting for the theoretically scheduled dates for the elections could cause excessive wear and tear that, honestly, only encourages not to talk about what is essential.
Europe values Spain’s economic indicators among the best in the European Union. We have close to 21 million people working and that has never happened. We have the best growth rate in the entire European Union and that is not valued. Because? Simply because they want to wrap us in the mantra of another discourse.
This week the Parliament of Castilla-La Mancha has been constituted with a new absolute majority of Emiliano García-Page, the only one from the PSOE in Spain… What role do you think the regional president should play in this context?
The result shows that Emiliano García-Page was right. We had to know what speeches had to be made in our land so that what has happened to others does not happen to us. And that has been recognized by sectors of the economy and the population in general that perhaps ideologically are not so coincidental with the president. He has known how to connect.
Emiliano has a determining role in national politics. There is no need to doubt it. I know that both he and all the Socialists are going to kill each other so that Pedro Sánchez continues to be president. We are more interested in citizens and our country than anything. For patriots us. Then the electoral result, like everything in life, will determine what happens.
