While Spain’s conservative People’s Party tries to distance itself from the discourse of far-right Vox, whose representatives have been denying that male violence exists, with just a month until the Spanish general election on July 23rd, the same two parties have reached an agreement for the extreme right group to preside over the Parliament of the Balearic Islands, with a governance agreement that includes, among other things, a plan to withdraw support from the islands’ language, Catalan. The position will be taken by Gabriel Le Senne, number seven on the party list, who has entered the Parliament in Palma de Mallorca after the local Vox leader, Jorge Campos, left to present himself as head of the party list in the Spanish election, following the example of the islands’ Socialist president Francina Armengol, who was defeated on May 28th. The choice of Le Senne, an ultra-conservative lawyer by profession, undermines the discourses that have been made by the PP trying to distance themselves from the far right, and the tweets of the new speaker demonstrate his machismo, homophobia, and also a denialism of climate change. And the messages are always written in Spanish, to boot.
“That’s why women are more belligerent because they don’t have penises”, said Le Senne, in a tweet in November 2020, while replying to a message that can no longer be read, because it had been published by a profile that has been suspended. This tweet went unnoticed, until this Tuesday, when dozens of users reacted to the online publications of the new Balearic Islands parliamentary speaker. He has also attacked the LGBTI collective on several occasions: “I block all advertisers with LGBTI flags”, said Le Senne a year ago on social media, referring to users that show a rainbow flag in support of the collective during June. “It’s clear that there are gay people at Vox. It’s one thing to be gay and another to support LGBTI scams and unjust laws,” said Le Senne on other occasions, always claiming to “stop the LGBTI indoctrination” of children in schools.
