XA Taboada Santiago 07/24/2023 at 23:34 CEST
The PP has looked for him a political exit for José Manuel Baltar after urging him to withdraw his candidacy to preside over the Ourense Provincial Council for being caught driving at 215 kilometers per hour on the Rías Baixas highway and pending trial for a road safety crime. The party will propose let him be a senator by autonomous designation, something that will be voted on this Friday in Parliament. The second man that the popular Galicians will take to the Senate is the former councilor and recently elected mayor of Ferrol José Manuel Rey Varela. They relieve in the seat Núñez Feijóo and Miguel Telladowho stopped because they were on the lists for Congress in last Sunday’s elections.
The PPdeG today announced the names of the two new faces that will sit in the Upper House. Baltar’s proposal comes after he was forced to leave the Provincial Council and allow a change of cycle in the provincial institution after more than three decades linked to her surname – first at the hands of her father, José Luis Baltar, and then under his command. Now the mayor of O Pereiro de Aguiar, Luis Menor, from the trusted orbit of the Galician leadership of the PP, presides over the institution.
His leader in the PPdeG, Alfonso Rueda, has also assumed that Baltar, who continues to lead the popular party in the province, will not run for re-election in the next organic congress, when it is convened. The Ourense leader, in any case, has not closed that door.
The appointment of Baltar as regional senator also means a turn to judgment who is pending for speeding. After twice dodging the first summons from the judge of Puebla de Sanabria –before starting the municipal electoral campaign–, the then president of the provincial institution and the PP of Ourense appeared electronically in the quick trial to which he was cited, but managed to delay the process.
By not expressing its agreement with the indictment or with the sentence requested by the Prosecutor’s Office, the quick trial has been transformed into an ordinary trial that will no longer be held in Puebla de Sanabria, but in a criminal court in Zamora. However, Baltar will become a qualified person upon making the jump to the Senate, so he can only be judged by the Supreme Court.
After being removed from the Provincial Council, Baltar requested reinstatement to his position as an official of the Xunta, a position to which he will surely not go to dedicate himself to the Senate.
As for Rey Varela, the former Minister of Social Policy has managed to recover the mayor’s office of Ferrol, where he was already in his day, with an absolute majority.
Both leaders will join the other twelve popular senators elected at the polls this Sunday. His election will take place in the extraordinary plenary session that will be held next Friday and will mark the closing of the current session period for the summer holidays.
Manuel Baltar also has a degree in Law. Civil servant, between 1998 and 2001 he was provincial delegate in Ourense of the Department of Agriculture. Later he was a regional deputy under the ranks of the PPdeG.
In February 2012, he inherited the presidency of the Ourense Provincial Council from his father, until he announced that he would no longer hold office last June. In 2010 he was elected president of the PP of Ourense, a responsibility that he maintains.
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