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The leader of Spain's far-right Vox party, Santiago Abascal, has responded this Thursday to its theoretical partners the Popular Party (PP) and Ciudadanos (Cs) that his party won't budge. Vox intends to maintain its conditions for helping to vote in the PP's Juanma Moreno as president of Andalusia, which in particular include the demand that measures to promote the Andalusian law against gender violence must be dropped from the coalition programme.

In a Twitter thread, Abascal threatens to block the formation of a government in Andalusia if PP and Cs do not meet his party's demands and he asserts that Vox wants to replace "gender ideology laws" because those laws "do not protect women, and do persecute men for the mere fact of being so". With this context, he then suggests new requests that could make the pact possible, but also warns the two other right-wing parties that "blackmail won't work" and that those who have denigrated Vox in the media "will be taken to court".

This was the Vox response after both the PP and Cs had appeared to rule out giving way on the issue. This Thursday, PP leader Pablo Casado defended his party's record on gender violence and said that "all parties and all of Spanish society must work towards its definitive eradication". Similarly, Lorena Roldán, deputy and senator for Ciudadanos, said that any relaxation in the fight against gender violence was "not an option that is open to negotiation".   

On Twitter, Abascal now accuses the two parties of having closed "a pact to divide up the places in the Andalucía government" and warns them that, in the absence of enough votes to make such a pact possible, "any sensible person understands that they will have to negotiate with someone else" - that is, with Vox.

"Of course, if Cs and PP want Vox's votes they will have to sit down with Vox and listen to the electoral programme that our 12 deputies represent" and "attend, in the appropriate measure, nothing more and nothing less, to these 12 deputies" and the "demands of 400,000 Andalusians" who voted for them.

Abascal insists that his party has said many times since election night that "it will not be an obstacle to change in Andalusia," but "it will not be a rubber stamp for the continuity of the same policies under new acronyms", whether a PSOE-Podemos coalition or a PP-Cs pact. "We are here to change politicians and politics," he says.

At this point, he complains about the insults which he believes he has received from the two parties which aspire to win Vox's support. "Far from any offer to negotiate, Vox has received only insults, disdain and the permanent threat of being isolated, and both Cs and PP have repeated that not even the slightest change is possible in the pact they signed."

For that reason he asks "what party is going to vote for the programme of other parties that scorn it and also betray its voters?". "Needless to say, not Vox," he concludes before accusing Cs circles of manipulating Vox's position "in favour of freedom and equality" and saying that "Vox supports violence against women." "We'll take to court the people who make these disgusting accusations," he warns.

Finally he warns that the withdrawal of measures against sexist violence is not the only issue that Vox will put on the table. The party also calls for tax reductions, the "dismantling of the parallel administration", the elimination of "ideological laws", and "support for the rural world and its ways of life."