John Culatto
NEW PSOE member of Spain’s parliament and current mayor of San Roque Juan Carlos Ruiz Boix visited Gibraltar to meet the caretaker Chief Minister.
Fabian Picardo met Friday with Ruiz Boix at No. 6 Convent Place after his election to the Spanish parliament at the last general election.
Boix has long been a supporter of a favourable EU treaty for Gibraltar and recently helped to sort out the recent problems of movement at Gibraltar’s border with Spain, the Rock’s government said.
The pair extended the discussion to the negotiations with the EU for the future status of Gibraltar after Brexit.
The government said in a statement that Ruiz Boix ‘expressed his full support for the continuation of cordial relations between the communities on both sides of the border’.
Boix said last July that the conservatives in Spain were ‘returning to their old ways of sowing discord’ about Gibraltar, in reference to the PP party manifesto at the last election.
“It seems that the interests of [PP leader] Alberto Núñez Feijóo is imposed by these retrograde policies of the Popular Party headed by the Foreign Minister, García Margallo and it seems that this position imposed by his possible Vox government partners is the one that is also imposed in the Popular Party,” Ruiz Boix said.
“There is a pursuit for confrontation and tension and to destroy the good relations that exist at the level of neighbours, family life and also to share employment, to share the economy and the many positive aspects that unite the neighbours of Gibraltar and Campo de Gibraltar.”
Only this week, the Popular Party’s Susana Perez Custodia took over as the head of the association of mayors of the Gibraltar Campo.
This was only possible after La Linea mayor Juan Franco switched his support from the PSOE to the PP, a matter which angered Boix.
But Perez Custodio, only the second woman in history to be president of the association, said she wanted to improve relations with Gibraltar.
Picardo’s meeting with Roix comes just weeks before elections to decide who will lead the new Gibraltar Government for the next four years.
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