Coalición Canaria and the Popular Party have requested the resignation of Carlos Meca as a councilor of the Cabildo, and in the case of the PP, they have also demanded that Podemos expel him from the party as a result of a cartoon published this Thursday by the satirical website El Agitador, of which Meca has been the director for years. In that cartoon, a montage appears with the image of the island president of the PP, Ástrid Pérez, and that of the president of the Cabildo, Pedro San Ginés, under the title "Everything ready for the premiere of the movie "Why do they call it Optimal Levels of Management when they mean sex?".
In this way, the cartoon refers to the possible entry of the PP into the minority government group of San Ginés and also to one of the statements made by Ástrid Pérez in the press conference she offered this week, in which she spoke of a "chaos" in the Arrecife City Council and of "optimal levels of management" in the Cabildo of Lanzarote.
"Meca makes a staging of a possible closing of the pact between PP and CC with sexual overtones, completely false," Coalición Canaria maintains in its statement, in which it attacks the work of "Meca and his team" on this satirical page and requests his "immediate resignation" as councilor for what it considers a "sexist and offensive" cartoon. For the nationalists, "this is a serious lack of respect towards the two people affected, the president of the Cabildo, Pedro San Ginés, and the president of the PP, Astrid Pérez".
"Many people have been affected"
The general secretary of Coalición Canaria in Lanzarote, Migdalia Machín, is the one who has come out to "condemn" this cartoon in which her party colleague Pedro San Ginés appears, although she has done so by linking the content of that montage to machismo. "We women have fought a lot, not only to take positions of relevance in politics, but even to vote, so that now people from the so-called progressive parties denigrate us in this way," she says.
"Meca and his team have been running this page of cartoons for many years, in which many people dedicated to politics and other public activities on the island have been affected. He does not realize that the many lies he tells there also harm the families of the protagonists," adds CC, which maintains that "jokes have a limit and that dedicating yourself to public service does not give other people the right to harassment such as that to which Mr. Carlos Meca subjects his own colleagues in the plenary".
The PP believes that it "attacks the dignity as a woman and mother" of its president
For its part, the PP accuses Meca of "constantly denigrating women" and of "using them publicly in a humiliating and sexist way, seriously attacking the honor and dignity of people." "The Popular Party expresses its strongest rejection of the publication for which Meca is responsible and which is used as a mere instrument to run a dirty campaign against leaders of other political formations without the slightest respect for personal integrity," the formation maintains, which considers that the cartoon "attacks the dignity as a woman and mother" of its island president.
"When one is a public official, there are limits that should not be exceeded under any circumstances, especially when they should be an example of honesty and respect towards others," says the island coordinator of the Popular Party, Saray Rodríguez, who considers it "intolerable that the spokesperson for the Podemos formation in the Cabildo of Lanzarote uses this type of degrading and totally offensive practices for the personal dignity and public image of people, putting into practice the sexist messages against women that they so much denounce as a political party."
For Rodríguez, "a party like Podemos, which has taken initiatives to public institutions against the use of the image of women as an advertising claim or the presence of women in tights as hostesses in sports events," cannot allow "one of its public officials and visible face of the party in Lanzarote to dedicate himself to using vulgar and degrading images of men and women repeatedly." "Tolerating this type of practices is to protect what they say they defend and contribute in a shameful way to the denigration of people," she says.
Although it is not an advertisement but a cartoon on a humorous website, the PP refers in its statement to the General Law of Audiovisual Communication, of March 2010, which "prohibits all advertising that uses the image of women in a derogatory and discriminatory manner," and adds that there is "another type of legislation linked to the protection of women." In this regard, it adds that "it is not the first time that this councilor has used women in a degrading way," so it asks Podemos to "immediately demand the resignation of Carlos Meca as a public official of the first island institution."
