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On April 29, Luis Robles received good and bad news. First, the good one: it gave negative in the test of the Covid-19 after 40 days of struggle that left him exhausted and with 15 kilos less. At face value, the bad: "someone" had changed the lock of the Alhambra City Council (Ciudad Real) and that of his mayor's office. He could not go to his workplace, and when he did, he discovered that even the access codes to his computer had been changed.
While he was ill, a motion of censure had been forged against him by his own PP colleagues. This May 22 , at 12 noon, the plenary will take place that will strip him of his staff after five years at the head of the town hall, which also includes the district of Pozo de la Serna ..
The popular govern with an absolute majority in this town in the Campo de Montiel region , with five councilors compared to the two of the PSOE. The four rebel councilors of the Municipal Popular Group do not need Robles to maintain the majority, so, after a string of collisions with him, they presented the motion of censure on May 6 before the incredulous gaze of the socialist councilors, temporarily relegated to second opposition party to the mayor.
The rebels - Victor Orejón , Lorenza Díaz , Jesús Clemente and Rafael Candelas - threw Robles out of the Popular Group, sending him to the "not attached". They cited "a complete lack of confidence." But behind this statement there is a background of disagreements and accusations that has even reached Genoa, 13.
The national leadership of the PP is aware of this motion, but prefers to adhere to the position of the party's provincial leadership, which washes its hands.
"Lie! You filthy lie!"
The president of the popular in Ciudad Real, Francisco Cañizares , has preferred not to go for either side , which is obviously a choice: leave the mayor behind and turn the page. "The provincial president of the PP has not called me, and he is behind all this," Robles complains, speaking to this newspaper.
But, what has happened to reach a motion of the PP against the PP ?. In their motion, the councilors argue that the mayor "acts in a personal and obscure way, preventing in most cases the collaboration of the rest of the members of the government team."
In addition, they accuse him of not executing the municipal budget, on the one hand, and of wanting to raise his salary -just before retiring, to collect a higher pension-, on the other.
"Lie! Filthy lie!", Answers the still mayor. "I have never spoken about salary. I have never told them that I was going to raise my salary. I swear by my three children that this is a lie!" "It was the secretary of the city council who asked him, but they did not want to," he clarifies.
"They kick me out now that there is money"
That of salary is the subject that arouses greater anger in Luis Robles, but it does not seem to him the true reason for the motion against him. He believes they kick him out for his austere management of municipal accounts.
"I am very demanding and what has happened to them is that they do not want as much control of spending as I do. They kick me out now that there is money in the coffers. The people have never looked this good like this. When I did not even have a secretary and I I worked until 12 at night, they did not want my position. Today there are 1,374,000 euros in treasury, and when I entered there was hardly anything: 163,000 euros and many debts to suppliers. The city council was a ruin. "
The mayor also denies that the Alhambra's economic health is due to the fact that it does not make productive investments. "It is a lie that I do not spend, but is that you can not spend what you want. The first term was to clean up the accounts and the second, to make investments," he justifies.
In this sense, he details some of those that he has undertaken since the May 2019 elections: "A paddle tennis court, a house supervised so that older people do not leave town and jobs are created, we have put LED lights, we have painted the buildings. "
"The people support me"
So?. "Envy, betrayal," she laments. "And that some of my colleagues ... or former colleagues, I do not know very well -ironiza- there were months that I did not even see them at the town hall, and I was the one who supplied them when they went to the olive or the grape harvest "stresses the mayor, who is not affiliated with the PP, like most councilors.
The quarrels rose when Luis Robles became infected with coronavirus. "When I was feeling bad, the PP's provincial leadership suggested that I resign, but they did not give me any arguments."
The mayor of Alhambra denounces that when the councilors of his group gave a positive result, calls from his official mobile phone were diverted to him, and that during the 40 days of his convalescence they forged a strategy to overthrow him, "with the approval of the PP of Ciudad Real, but not of the president of the PP of Alhambra ".
And April 29 came when the changed lock was found. "I changed it again and reported it at the Civil Guard headquarters. They said that the two locks had been damaged: the one on the door of the town hall and the one on my office ... of course!"
This Friday, Luis Robles will stop being mayor of the Alhambra and of the hamlet of Pozo de la Serna. But at least one consolation will remain: "The people support me."
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