The President of the Canary Islands Government, Adán Martín, announced this Tuesday in his last intervention in the Debate on the State of the Nation that he will not preside over the next Executive because he will not be the Coalición Canaria (CC) candidate for the presidency in the May 2007 elections.
Adán Martín waited until the end of the debate to communicate his decision not to repeat as a candidate, but clarified that his announcement is not a farewell, because he has four months left "of intense work", but rather a mere forecast of the future.
The president was concluding his third and last reply, when he launched a phrase - "I will not preside over it" (the Government) - which caught those present by surprise, to later explain that "deliberately, I did not want to make this debate either an electoral screen for the future candidate, nor a farewell. And it is now when I announce - and not at the beginning of the debate - that I will not be a candidate for the Presidency of the Government, in the last minute of the last general policy debate". Despite the fact that Martín's intention was not to distort the course of the session with the clarification of an unknown that CC has maintained for months, the truth is that his statement has left everything debated throughout the morning in the background.
His unexpected announcement provoked a general applause from the deputies present in the room, some of whom, such as the socialist leader, Juan Carlos Alemán, immediately embraced him and others, such as the nationalist deputy Flora Marrero, could not avoid signs of commotion.
Martín had avoided clearing up the unknown about his candidacy in his last public appearances and even in the last one, on Saturday, he made clear his absolute availability to the decisions about his future that the party would take. Finally, he chose to do so during the last Debate on the Nationality to which he will attend as president.
He continued his speech, saying that with it he wanted to "give testimony of a work, of the confirmation that this land has been and is capable of advancing a lot in the future if we make unity our strength and work our method". Thus, he made the "relay" contributing this advice.
In addition, he defended the actions of his Government in the present legislature, and described it as "honest to the letter" a statement that he said "with pride", while also calling it "responsible", because "they have not been oblivious to either the problems of the future or those of the past", as well as "effective", because "it has not wasted time in fueling the brawl to wear down anyone".
The Canarian president assured that it has not been an Executive that has remained silent when it comes to claiming from the State what Europe already recognizes, and stressed that his Cabinet has done its homework, has pursued social, economic and territorial cohesion, as well as quality of life.
However, he said that no one achieves heaven in a few years unless they abandon the earth, and acknowledged that there is much to be done, while expressing his conviction that progress has been made in the right direction.
Insinuations and rumors
Although since last Christmas Adán Martín began to make it clear that he would not run in the next elections, the truth is that rumors had skyrocketed in recent days and once again placed the current president as a possible head of the CC list. In fact, shortly before the intervention made this Tuesday by Adán Martín, the president of the Popular Party of the Canary Islands, José Manuel Soria, expressed his conviction that Martín "is going to repeat as a candidate".
Soria interpreted the attitude supposedly against this option of "some members of his party, some sitting very close to you and interested in occupying exactly your same seat" (probably, in reference to the Minister of Economy and Finance, José Carlos Mauricio) that in reality "what they want is to encourage him to be a candidate".
According to his argument, Martín made a speech this Monday, during the first session of the Debate on the State of the Nation, with which he "wanted to give some message" to these members of his party, and "in fact, he would not have known how to make that speech if they had not poked him". Thus, he opined that "he is going to repeat and he will owe it to whoever is very close, because although he says otherwise, what he has wanted is to encourage him to be a candidate". However, shortly after Adán Martín definitively ruled himself out to head the CC list, reopening the pools on who will occupy that position.
