The Baltars, the PP clan that raised votes even at wakes | News from Galicia

“Count on me for anything. Do you have a relative on the waiting list at the hospital? Come to me! Any procedure that is not progressing? The same! And if I don’t open the door for you, kick it down!” With this uninhibited declaration of principles, José Luis Baltar Pumar presented himself to his neighbors when in 1990 he became president of the Ourense Provincial Council. The offer worked for him. He held the position for more than two decades and, upon retiring, he bequeathed it to his son José Manuel, surname Baltar Blanco. The harangue that cut the ribbon on Baltarism is rescued by journalists Cristina Huete and Primitivo Carbajo in The Baltars, the path of caciquismo in full democracy (Editorial Morgante), the first book that dissects the political method that, from the only landlocked Galician province, kept the PP’s dominance afloat in Galicia and which is presented this Thursday at 8 p.m. at the Tanco bookstore in Ourense.

Baltar opened his reign with a call to despotism, which he never renounced and which turned out to be profitable. His only judicial conviction came 24 years later for just a hundred plugs. They caught him placing a string of PP members in the Provincial Council just when the party congress was going to be held in which his son was competing for leadership in a dog-face with a disciple of Alberto Núñez Feijóo. The patriarch received the penalty of disqualification for prevarication with his heir already settled in his father’s office. That operation with which the family stopped Feijóo’s challenge to their power was just a drop in that ocean of baltarism that Huete and Carbajo, both former EL PAÍS journalists, document in their book. She was a correspondent in Ourense for this newspaper between 2006 and 2022, which she joined with a master’s degree in the clan after almost 20 years in The Voice of Galicia. The pages of the book bring together decades of his research work on the exorbitant salaries of the army of PP mayors, the contracts to related construction companies, the distribution of public employment between militants and their families or the collection of vintage vehicles that Baltar treasured. in a chicken shed.

The Provincial Council of Ourense employed twice as many workers as that of A Coruña despite serving a third of the population. In 2011, without counting family members, there were 113 PP councilors on staff. He hired so many local development agents that there were not enough seats even scattered around the town halls, so they had to divide the day to occupy each position only for a while, while others drank coffee or went out on some errand. 75% of the budget for works was spent on payroll and the councilor of a municipality of 1,000 inhabitants could earn a salary of 75,000 euros. On planet Baltar there was even a neighbor who one day discovered to his astonishment that a PP leader and his family had registered in his house. In that region, the popular parties were playing for crucial seats.

At the same time that he attended the jobs, subsidies and contracts window, Baltar displayed his people skills and friendliness throughout the province. A trained teacher and lively trombonist, he never missed a party or a wake. He always made sure that no one in Ourense forgot what he wanted to make clear when he reached the top of the Provincial Council. In his official car, he kept a briefcase with money in case he had to please someone. He even gave 3,000 euros to a pedestrian in front of everyone as an advance on a subsidy.

What would have happened to Fraga or Feijóo without this know how? “Without the support of the Baltaristas, both would have lost the Galician Government,” responds Huete, alluding to the 2004 apartment episode, when five deputies from this faction, including Baltar Jr., locked themselves in a house in Ourense and threatened to blow up the absolute majority of Fraga was blown up. Feijóo tried to take power from the Baltars so that the same thing as the founder of the PP would not happen to him, but “he came out so scalded that he ended up, like before, always bowing to the Baltars’ wishes,” adds the journalist.

Carbajo highlights the role of the patriarch in Fraga’s arrival to the Xunta in 1989, “with an alleged blow that was not investigated.” It refers to the mysterious episode of the bags with emigration votes found in a post office in Ourense two months after election day, recovered recently by journalist Óscar Iglesias. “Baltarism is a good example of what the PP is and how it has been sustained in Galicia,” he says. “It has been assumed as a picturesque thing, but it has had a lot of impact.” He explains that the use of the expression “full democracy” in the title of the book has “a point of withdrawal”: “How can a full democracy allow Baltarism? It was backed by the ballot boxes, but democracy, to be full, has to be more than just voting.”

Baltar Jr. is not Baltar. A very popular parody song says it In Ourense and Huete he sees there the reason for the decline of the clan. Baltar Blanco “was neither nice nor empathetic, nor did he do favors even if they were with public money, nor did he cultivate the friendship of the enormous troop of mayors, the true power of Baltarism, which his father bequeathed to him.” “Many ended up fed up with him. In addition, it was increasingly difficult to plug in,” he explains.

Despite the patriarch’s conviction for malfeasance and the son’s recent prosecution for driving at 215 kilometers per hour, the family has done well in court. Complaints were filed against the father of an electoral agent in Argentina who accused him of paying him with public money and also investigations into his large assets and an alleged B box in the party. The son was acquitted of sexual harassment after a PP colleague accused him of offering her a job in exchange for sex. On the contrary, one of his associates, a PSOE turncoat who joined the popular ranks with employment in the Provincial Council, did manage to put Huete on the bench through criminal proceedings for calling him a turncoat in an information. It was an unusual trial from which she was acquitted.

Huete and Carbajo’s book arrives in the form of an autopsy. The alleged death of Baltarism was certified on June 14, 2023, the day the heir announced that he was leaving the Provincial Council. Baltar Blanco continues in politics, taking refuge in the discreet and well-paid backroom of the Senate while the case against him for driving an official car at 215 speeds when he was president of the provincial institution and leader of the PP of Ourense is slowly being processed. He managed to delay what was going to be a quick trial until after the municipal elections of that year, but Feijóo’s successor, Alfonso Rueda, later dropped him to facilitate an agreement with Democracia Ourensana that would allow the PP to retain the Provincial Council. Feijóo could not finish off the Baltars but Rueda could. The family office is now occupied by someone close to the president of the Xunta, Luis Menor. “The structure of Baltarism has not disappeared; “it maintains many town halls,” warns Huete. “But the Provincial Council no longer has that delirious capacity to create jobs, which was what generated loyalty that was later converted into votes.” Carbajo also believes that the political machinery of this family survives in Ourense and that Rueda “tries to take advantage of it”: “We will have to wait for the next elections to verify this, but I do not see any action by the PP to dismantle it.”