The judge on leave who stormed the Congress table in the Tejero style

BarcelonaIn the Congress, everyone points out that, more and more, it seems the lions aren't just staying at the door. Last Tuesday, the one who showed his claws was José María Sánchez García, a VOX deputy since 2019, who, in the middle of a debate to document the burning of books during Francoism, and after being expelled from the session, climbed onto the table and confronted the presidency of the Congress. "The only thing I was thinking was where the slap would come from", admitted hours later the socialist Alfonso Rodríguez Gómez de Celis, who at that moment was chairing the plenary session in place of Francina Armengol.

A lawyer, a judge on leave, and a professor of State Ecclesiastical Law at the University of Seville, with an extensive academic career, Sánchez García is accustomed to wandering around Congress with "total impunity, especially against women," states, in conversation with ARA, Alda Recas, a Sumar deputy who sits near him. From referring to the president of Congress as "president" – in masculine –, to hiding behind his mobile phone to hurl insults every now and then. Sánchez García adopts an attitude characterized by "arrogance and classism," highlights Recas, "with constant misogynistic, racist, and xenophobic undertones." In fact, in September 2021 he called socialist deputy Laura Berja a "witch" and in December 2020 he referred to popular deputy Ana Belén as a "loud Galician deputy." Such a usual demeanor that it "doesn't surprise almost anyone anymore," says the Sumar deputy.

"The Republic was characterized by creating schools and fighting illiteracy, and furthermore, while you were making pacts with the Nazis," were the words that Jordi Salvador, an ERC deputy in Congress, hurled at him last Tuesday, as revealed to ARA, and which made Sánchez García react. At that moment, the Vox deputy exploded, grabbed his seat's microphone and stated that Salvador had called him "a Nazi, a murderer, an illiterate, and a jerk". "This man doesn't sit in his seat and stands next to me, with the aisle in between. And he starts saying 'burn books, burn books'," clarifies Salvador to this newspaper. All this under the complicit umbrella of Santiago Abascal, leader of VOX, who watched the scene from a television in the Congress cafeteria.