2023-06-28 15:19:16
The president of Vox, Santiago Abascal (left), and the deputy and candidate for Vox for Asturias, José María Figaredo, in Gijón this Tuesday. Xuan Cueto – Europa Press (Europa Press)
The Central Electoral Board (JEC) has reprimanded and reminded Vox this Wednesday that it cannot exclude any journalist from its actions, a veto that it has been imposing for years at its rallies and press conferences at its headquarters on representatives of EL PAÍS, the SER or eldiario.es, as the JEC itself has already established in previous pronouncements based on two Supreme Court rulings in this regard. The Board has also responded this Wednesday to a complaint by Vox against the Atresmedia group and the El Hormiguero program for not scheduling one with its leader, Santiago Abascal, among its pre-election interviews these days, as it did this Tuesday with Pedro Sánchez and this same Wednesday with the popular Alberto Núñez Feijóo. The JEC notifies Atresmedia without citing any program that its coverage of political information in these periods it must be “proportional” as determined by electoral law.
What the Central Electoral Board has not yet done is take sides and position on the face-to-face debates scheduled for the July 23 elections and the dispute between various media and various parties. No complaint or formal complaint has yet reached the JEC in this regard and, therefore, the matter has not been discussed in this Wednesday’s session, nor has the coverage plan provided by RTVE for the different parties. This issue could be studied in future meetings, as will be done on Wednesday of next week with Sumar’s proposal, which came in late Tuesday, to extend the possibility of attending from eight in the afternoon until ten at night. to vote at the polling stations. That issue will also be addressed next week.
The aspect that the JEC has studied this Wednesday has been a letter presented by the PRISA Group —publisher of EL PAÍS and SER—, on the veto imposed by Vox against its journalists to cover most of their activities for information. The JEC reminds him in its response to Vox previous resolutions of that electoral control body, based on specific rulings of the Supreme Court, in which it is stated that no political party can or should exclude a media outlet from its actions.
In March 2021, the high court already concluded in this sense that Vox thus discriminated against Grupo PRISA media for considering them “hostile”, which implied an impairment of “the guarantees of transparency and objectivity” that electoral processes must offer. Then, the judges of the Contentious-Administrative Chamber dismissed the appeals presented by the formation of Santiago Abascal against two agreements issued by the JEC as a result of complaints presented by EL PAÍS and SER after receiving an email from Vox in the that it was reported that, from that moment on, the party would not grant accreditations to any journalist from the Grupo PRISA media, neither to access its headquarters, nor for any act that the party organized in private spaces. The Electoral Board estimated the claims of both media and informed Vox that it could not discriminate against them, a decision that the Supreme Court endorsed.
The Electoral Board also sends a notice to the Atresmedia group in response to a Vox appeal because the El Hormiguero program has not included one with Santiago Abascal among its pre-election interviews these days. According to the document presented by Vox, by not inviting Abascal to the program, not only is this party deprived of presenting its points of view to the audience, but also, “from the citizen’s point of view, their access to information is being limited necessary to adequately configure the will to decide the vote, which is the basis of our democratic system”.
Vox’s appeal has not been admitted, among other reasons because the JEC considers that it is not competent to specify to any means of communication what type of interviews it should introduce in a general way in its programs. What the JEC does do is warn Atresmedia, as it does with the plans and coverage of other media, that it must comply with the principle of “proportionality”.
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The arbitrator of the elections thus recalls in its resolution the literalness of article 66.2 of the Electoral Law: “During the electoral period, privately owned broadcasters must respect the principles of pluralism and equality. Likewise, in said period, private television stations must also respect the principles of proportionality and informative neutrality in electoral debates and interviews as well as in the information related to the electoral campaign in accordance with the Instructions that, for this purpose, the Electoral Board prepares. competent”.
The controversy over face-to-face debates continues for now in the sphere of the parties and the media that have sued them. For now, the PSOE candidate for the July 23 elections, Pedro Sánchez, and the PP candidate, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, will meet at the end in a single face-to-face on television, initially on July 10 at Atresmedia. The opposition leader’s rejection of all other proposed meetings forces the Prime Minister to settle for just one face-to-face. The PP announced this Tuesday that it will only accept a duel in that format, and the PSOE assured that it is willing to assume all the debates that are proposed. Feijóo thus accepts, at least for the moment, a single debate between the two leaders of the six that the Prime Minister came to propose and of the four proposals that both parties had on the table, from Grupo PRISA (publisher of EL PAÍS). , RTVE, Atresmedia and Mediaset. The popular ones have also proposed to Atresmedia another electoral appointment to seven with representatives of the PSOE, PP, Sumar, Vox, ERC, PNV and Bildu for July 5 that the chain has not confirmed.
The popular ones have flatly rejected the possibility of debating on public television and have also entered into an open war against RTVE because they consider it partisan in favor of the PSOE candidate. The PP’s Deputy Secretary for Institutional Action, Esteban González Pons, set out this Tuesday in a letter addressed to the president of RTVE, Elena Sánchez, his reasons for breaking off that negotiation: “We could not even imagine that the recovery of that broken negotiation, on behalf of the PSOE, it was going to be carried out by the head of the news of RTVE”. And he ended with an attack against the impartiality of RTVE: “We do not trust its neutrality.” The Council and the Corporation of the public entity have replied to that letter, disqualifying it as “prejudiced” and have defended its “neutral, independent and plural” character to celebrate those face to face.
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