Cristina Ibarrola has announced through the Diario de Navarra that this Sunday he will take over the presidency of UPN. Ibarrola has taken the decision with the approval of the current president, Javier Esparza, who announced that he would not be re-tabled on 26 January.

For various reasons, the situation within UPN is not easy. On the one hand, Esparza has held three sessions to reach the presidency of the Government of Navarra in 2015, 2019 and 2023. UPN won the elections in the three, but has not been able to form government.

In addition, in 2022 UPN suffered a major internal crisis when deputies Sergio Sayas and Carlos García Adanero voted against the labor reform of the PSOE that were debating in the Spanish Congress, against party orders. The two deputies have ended in the PP and the PP has grown in the municipal and foral elections of 2023.

But after the earthquake in Adanero-Sanz, Esparza has received important criticisms within the UPN. The best known were those made by Miguel Sanz in the summer of 2023. “In politics we must add as much as possible, reduce as little as possible, increase prudently and divide the opposite,” said the leader of UPN between 1996 and 2011. He stressed that the UPN in Esparza does nothing of this: “On the contrary, the PSN and Basque nationalism are increasingly joining.”

The anger of the Ribera, with Toquero at the head

On 16 December UPN held its annual political assembly in which internal discrepancies were noted. According to the chronicle of the following day of the Diario de Navarra, the mayor of Arguedas, José Antonio Rapún, read the letter signed on December 13 by several voters of the Ribera de UPN, who declared the militancy discouraged and accused the UPN management of having carried out an uncritical internal management without self-criticism.

Esparza replied that they had to follow the steps to the UPN Congress together, but accused them of holding the Ribera Assembly on December 13, when EH Bildu realised the Pamplona censorship motion. This group of the Ribera is headed by Alejandro Toquero, Mayor of Tudela, who won by an absolute majority the municipal elections last year in the capital of the Ribera and has been listened strongly in recent months among the names of Esparza.

Ibarrola-Toquero

It is not clear whether Toquero is presenting himself to the presidency of UPN, but it is clear that Cristina Ibarrola has made a movement not agreed with her: she has offered him a vice-presidency on her list. Ibarrola announced his candidacy through the interview of the Diario de Navarra and, according to the media on the right Navarra.es, Ibarrola had communicated the interview to Toquero hours before, via a telephone call at midnight.

According to this medium, in Ribera they are angry with the molds used by Esparza and Ibarrola. However, it is not clear whether they are going to submit another application. The UPN Congress will be held on April 28 and nominations may be submitted up to two weeks earlier. However, this Monday, as Diario de Noticias says, Saturday Ibarrola and Toquero joined the parties of Peralta and talked. The midnight call is later.

Mayor of Pamplona and Presidency of Navarra

The dream of UPN is to regain the presidency of the Foral Government, but since the alliance with the PSN at the time of ETA was left behind, this goal has become very difficult. Ibarrola has already announced that he does not want to be a candidate for the presidency of the Government of Navarra and has announced that his wish is to recover the mayor of Pamplona. So far, the president of UPN has always been president of the Government of Navarra, as demonstrated by Juan Cruz Alla, Miguel Sanz and Yolanda Barcina.

On December 28 he had to leave the mayor of Pamplona in the direction of Ibarrola, EH Bildu and PSN after Joseba Asirón recovered the command staff. Cristina Ibarrola was appointed managing director of Osasunbidea in 2011, when Yolanda Barcina was president of the Foral Government. Later, in 2019, Navarre was a member of Suma, where she began to publicly highlight a bit with the criticisms made of Santos Indurain, PSN advisor during the pandemic.