Simon Hunter
FAR-RIGHT Vox has called for Spain’s secretary of state for equality to be sacked, after she shared a video from Wednesday’s International Women’s Day march of a group of youngsters chanting insults against the party’s leader.
In the recording, Angela Rodriguez is seen taking a selfie video of herself before moving the camera onto the line of young women. They are chanting: ‘What a shame that the mother of [Santiago] Abascal could not get an abortion!’
The women were referring to the leader of the extreme party Vox, which is vehemently pro-life.
The recording was widely criticised by right-wing figures on Twitter when it came to light, and prompted a response via Vox’s account.
‘Mr Sanchez,’ the message reads, in reference to Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. ‘We would like to understand that you will not endorse the actions of your secretary of state and that you will immediately fire her.’
If not, the message continued, the PM and the government would be ‘crossing a line from which it will later be very difficult to return’.
For her part, Rodriguez deleted the recording but defended her actions today in Congress. ‘Members of Vox have never been at a feminist demonstration and as such they do not know that there are a wide variety of chants,’ she told reporters. ‘It is up to them what they decide to say or not say.’
Rodriguez, who is known by her nickname ‘Pam’, is the effective second in command at the Equality Ministry, and a member of the Unidas Podemos political bloc, which is the junior partner in the coalition government.
The leader of Spain’s main opposition Popular Party, Alberto Nuñez Feijoo, also got involved in the row. ‘I have always said, not everything goes in politics,’ he wrote on his Twitter account. ‘My solidarity with Santiago Abascal and his family.’
The spokesperson for Unidas Podemos in Congress, Pablo Echenique, sought to mock Vox for its reaction. He shared a meme with a photo of a cartoonishly muscular Santiago Abascal criticising a ‘disgusting law from made women in the Cabinet’, next to an image of the politician crying with the caption ‘some girls said some things to me at the Women’s march! Help!’
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