Thousands of people participated this Saturday in a demonstration in Madrid called as an “ultimatum to the Government” by the Spanish Civil Society platform and supported by PP and Vox. At the head of the protest, which began the route in the Plaza de Cibeles and concluded at the so-called Arco de la Victoria, Marcos de Quinto, former Ciudadanos deputy, and Alejo Vidal-Quadras, former president of the Popular Party in Catalonia and one of the founders of Santiago Abascal's party, shared a banner, who took a selfie in the march while they shouted "president, president!" The PP did not send its leader, but its general secretary, Miguel Tellado, and that absence did not go unnoticed by the public, who chanted every so often: “Feijóo, where are you, I can't see you?”
"THE PP," explained Tellado at the beginning of the march, "joins and supports this demonstration to demand immediate elections from the Government. Spain is unprotected. Ceuta has been the victim of an invasion and the Government of Spain is not acting. We have some gentlemen using the Moncloa palace as a refuge to defend themselves from legal cases." The number two of the PP assured that “a clan of drug traffickers has more honor than the Government of Spain” and demanded the “immediate” dissolution of the Chambers to call elections. Asked if the PP supports, as Vox demands, that Pedro Sánchez be “tried for treason” in application of article 102 of the Constitution, Tellado declared that “a general feeling” believes that the Executive, “despite the fact that it knew what was going to happen [in Ceuta] did not act”, but did not want to clarify if it supports this initiative by Abascal. “At the moment there are proceedings open in the National Court and we trust in justice.” “The Government must be thrown out just as the invaders must be thrown out,” he concluded.
Abascal, for his part, accused the Government of “kidnapping” the minors of Ceuta instead of immediately sending them back to their parents, despite the fact that current law prevents doing so without guarantees to protect them, and charged against the PP for rejecting both his proposal for “a joint government” in the autonomous city, and that Sánchez be tried “for treason.” In 2024, Vox broke the regional coalition governments with the PP precisely because of the distribution among autonomies of unaccompanied foreign minors, which the PP complied with, in accordance with the law. However, later, when the Popular Party needed their votes to continue occupying the presidency of those regional executives, they signed agreements with the far-right party specifying: “No more menas,” which is how they derogatorily refer to immigrant children.
The PP did not want to be left out of the photo and for Vox to capitalize on the discontent in the street, but it was the formation chaired by Abascal that took the image, since many of the banners raised by the protesters included the logo of the far-right party, which distributed them at the beginning of the route.
The Government Delegation estimated the number of attendees at 20,000, which is half that of the previous protest called by Spanish Civil Society, when they raised that estimate to 40,000. In fact, during the tour, some of the protesters, who had participated in the previous one, complained that this Saturday's one was having fewer people. “There has been no publicity and people have not found out,” lamented Carmen, 66 years old. Others blamed the lack of attendance on “the regime's media.” Asked about this, Vidal-Quadras assured that we had to "wait to see the aerial photographs", but assured that "hundreds of thousands of people" had demonstrated against a Government "that is in the hands of the enemies of the nation." Marcos de Quinto insisted that “hundreds of thousands of people” had participated in the protest. Asked if he believed that among them there were people who were unemployed or who received the minimum vital income, who recently, in a tweet, asked that their right to vote be withdrawn, he answered: “Very likely, because people of all kinds have come here.”
At the end of the protest, there was not the usual reading of the manifesto and a hundred people attempted to continue the march to the La Moncloa palace. When a police barrier prevented them from doing so, the protesters verbally confronted the officers, whom they called “sellouts.”
