Vox parliamentarian Emilio Jiménez has leveled accusations against the President of the Government of Navarre, María Chivite, whom he accuses of having taken a week of “political vacations” during her institutional trip to Peru and Argentina “with the money of the people of Navarre.” The head of the regional executive has responded by pointing to Jiménez’s “rumors and falsehoods” and has reproached him for having neither “commitment nor knowledge.”
Chivite, who was intervening in the plenary session of the Parliament of Navarre to answer a question put forward by Vox, has given an assessment that was “very positive” of the official visit to both countries, “because we have been able to verify on the ground and first-hand that the money that the people of Navarre earmark for development cooperation to help other countries works and has an enormous social return.”
The president has invited Vox’s representative, a party that she has described as “enthusiastic” about Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, to travel to that country to check “first-hand that his policies do not improve people’s lives.” Along these lines, she has stated that what really “upsets” Vox about the trip is that “there is no better way to counterpose policies than to see and listen to where they are applied.”
For his part, Emilio Jiménez has insisted that Chivite has left “on political vacation at the expense of the taxpayer, with an agenda perfectly designed for photographs, to hand out speeches, and to fuel her own promotion.” “Does she really intend for us to believe that this has nothing to do with the election campaign?” he questioned, while also arguing that with this trip the president intended to “save herself the political cost of appearing” in “the photograph of the new budget pact with EH Bildu.”
In response to these accusations, Chivite has replied that “I can’t quite understand what you think is wrong with me visiting the people of Navarre abroad. A question that all the presidents of Navarre have done throughout history,” and she has emphasized that the funds that Navarre allocates to cooperation “are helping to pull women out of obscurity, out of extreme poverty, and out of sexist violence in countries where precisely it is not easy” to do so.
The president has added that "we already know that you neither believe in cooperation, nor in equality policies, nor in democratic policies of memory, peace and coexistence." She has also pointed out that "also that I know that you don't like that we remind you what the Argentine military dictatorship was, nor that we share with Argentines what they are experiencing with Milei's policies."
In this context, Chivite has accused Vox of being "constructing hoaxes and falsehoods, because it knows what has truly increased in Argentina: unemployment and extreme poverty, thanks to those policies that you applaud." And she capped her intervention by defending that "that is why there is no better way to do politics than from commitment and knowledge, which is precisely what you don't have."