Only one person came to the rescue of Isabel Díaz Ayuso in the midst of her scandals. And he is the only one who has come out today in defence of Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo: former Spanish prime minister José María Aznar. After Popular Party spokesperson Álvarez de Toledo stood in parliament and called Pablo Iglesias's father a "terrorist" for his 1970s membership of the anti-Franco group FRAP, it has been Aznar's foundation which has now asserted that she can remain "calm" in the face of the legal action announced by Francisco Javier Iglesias. And it made this statement, paradoxically, based on a European Court of Human Rights ruling on Basque politician Arnaldo Otegi.
In an article published on its website, the FAES Foundation recalls how in 2011 the Strasbourg court found in favour of the EH Bildu leader when he said that the then-monarch Juan Carlos I was "the head of the torturers", and awarded him compensation of 20,000 euros. The ECHR framed this in the freedom of expression. "If calling the king the 'head of the torturers' is simply annoying or hostile, as the ECHR ruling said, remembering that someone served in an organization that practiced terrorist violence would be, shall we say, an example of the right to freely disseminate truthful information", says the conservative foundation run by Aznar.
Alvarez de Toledo "can be calm in the face of legal action which Pablo Iglesias' father say he is taking," asserts the FAES.
The foundation is heavily critical of the deputy Spanish PM and Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias, saying that he is an "aggressive populist who seeks nothing more than social breakdown, antagonism and demonization of his opponents". Iglesias, says the FAES, constitutes "the expression of a practice of assaulting democracy and destabilizing its representative institutions", and has toured "the Basque taverns paying homage to ETA and the so-called abertzale left" as well as "praising the Catalan coup plotters as democrats".
At the same time, Aznar's propaganda organ also takes aim more broadly at the Spanish government and the Catalan and Basque parties - ERC and EH Bildu - which helped it to power: "a party whose leader has been convicted of sedition and another party which, in addition to not condemning any of ETA's crimes, has as its senior leader a person convicted of terrorism."
Legal action
Hours after Wednesday's events in Congress that Francisco Javier Iglesias, father of the Spanish deputy PM, announced that he would take Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo to court for calling him a "terrorist" for his relationship with the FRAP group five decades ago. “It angers me to do so, because in the end we all pay the fines together,” he asserted. Journalist Hermann Tertsch, now a member of the European Parliament for Vox, has already been convicted for making a similar accusation.