Well, the Mayor of Almuñécar's 2nd-in-command achieved enough votes to secure the mayoralty for his party, but the consequences will be known year.

Benavides has won the most votes in nine of the last eleven municipal elections but owing to a determination to keep him from office by a rather strange political alliance, the PP, despite having fewer council seats and voters, has kept him from the mayor’s baton for the last three legislative cycles.

The decisive vote came from the far-left party IU-Podemos, as was the case in the last municipal elections in 2019. Paco Fernández Morgan, who leads the IU and has been a teacher for 40 years, decided that his personal animosity towards Juan Carlos Benavides took precedence over the left-wing ideology of his party, and voted in favour of a conservative mayor.

As explained in an article within the printed version of the magazine (which comes out this Friday) such a decision will have repercussions for his party in next year’s elections. Having only sufficient votes in 2019 to obtain one seat in the Town Council (representing a drop in seats), he had no worries about supporting the right-wing candidate back then because the next elections were four years away.

However, repeating this manoeuvre just over a year away from the municipal elections could well have dire consequences for his party  existence in Almuñécar.

After all, if the wishes of left-wing voters that voted for him in 2019 was to have a right-wing mayor, they would have voted for her party. If those same voters shared his aversion to Benavides, they could have voted for the socialists (PSOE) that would have at least been voting for the ‘left.’

But to assume that the people that voted for his far-left formation in 2019 all share his dislike Benavides is a dangerous gamble at the very least.

Anyway, there is one group of citizens that are far from happy with every politician in the Council, because the debating session prior to voting went on far longer than expected, owing to councillors being desperate (perhaps) to explain why they were going to vote as they intended.

Consequently, a children’s dancing performance, scheduled to take place in the auditorium that day had to be cancelled, leaving the mothers so absolutely livid that the police had their work cut out for them trying to stop them bursting into the auditorium and voicing their discontent to the culprits’ faces.

(News: Almunecar, Costa Tropical, Granada, Andalucia)