"You didn't have the balls to denounce Israel's genocide": Broncano and Abascal clash on 'La Revuelta'

BarcelonaIn October 2019, during a conversation with Gerard Piqué on La Resistencia, the footballer asked David Broncano: "Would you bring Abascal onto your show?". "No, I wouldn't," the host replied, following the controversy over Pablo Motos' interview with Abascal a few days earlier on El Hormiguero. Seven years later, the Vox candidate for the general elections appeared this Monday on La Revuelta.

Broncano had hinted that the interview with Santiago Abascal had been imposed by the Central Electoral Board (JEC), but this body has denied it. RTVE has also denied that it forced him to bring Abascal and has stated that the program had invited the main candidates. "On public television, things change and the context is not the same," the host tried to justify when the interview began.

The fact is that Abascal has arrived on La Revueltaamid great expectation because it brought face to face two ideologically antagonistic profiles. So much so that, unlike the previous interviews with Pedro Sánchez or with Gabriel Rufián and Irene Montero, which were conducted with the program's usual audience, this time the attendees were chosen by an agency through Vox, who greeted him with shouts of "president, president".

"I am very happy that there are people here today who have never seen us before," the host joked. And while he put on the pin with the flag of Spain, as he always does when candidates for the Spanish presidency come, he highlighted: "We leftists also love Spain". To try to deny any kind of complicity with Motos, Abascal let slip: "They don't invite me to El Hormiguero".

Tension from the start

Broncano had already warned that he would not be "equidistant" with the Vox leader and the tension was palpable from the start, as Abascal later denounced upon leaving: "More than an interview, it was a very serious debate," he retorted to questions from the media. The greeting was already cold. And during the traditional gift that the guest gives to Broncano, Abascal admitted that his supporters had told him to bring him a stone or a cobblestone, but in the end, he gifted him a flag of Ceuta to denounce that they have already been enduring "one hundred days of invasion." "We differ on the terminology, but we are with Ceuta," Broncano replied.

Unlike the interviews he held with Pedro Sánchez or the duo of Gabriel Rufián and Irene Montero, this interview turned into a clash between the two. Broncano warned him right at the start: "The other day you criticized that I made more jokes than an actual interview with Sánchez and Rufián, and today we will do the opposite."

And that is where the back-and-forth between them began. The comedian confronted him about Vox's support for Israel, and Abascal wanted to make it clear that he has only spoken with the Hebrew government three times, one of which was to discuss the independence of Catalonia. "I find it very intense that one of the three times you have spoken with Israel was for the independence of Catalonia, and yet never for the thousands of deaths in Gaza," criticized Broncano. "You didn't have the guts to denounce Israel's genocide," the host continued, in one of the most tense moments of the show, to the point that Broncano apologized for his words. "Hamas is the main culprit because it uses people as human shields," Abascal replied.

The host reproached him for the fact that Vox does not support rallies against sexist murders. "We are criminalizing our people and there has been an attempt to politicize these murders," Abascal replied. Broncano showed him an image of a rally that Vox distanced itself from, where a banner could be seen reading "Enough gender-based violence," and Abascal said he did not remember if that was the demonstration they were absent from.

The head of the Vox list also said that "housing, along with immigration, is Spain's main problem" and claimed that they have discredited the encampment in the Puerta del Sol in Madrid because "the Spanish government is primarily responsible for the rise in housing prices." "Five million people have entered and only 400,000 homes have been built, and that puts strain on the market," he added, stressing that "demand exceeds supply." Broncano then asked him about vulture funds and speculative purchasing, and Abascal responded by asking if El Gran Wyoming, who has several properties, also falls into that group.

Faced with Broncano's insistence on the scientific evidence of climate change that Vox rejects, Abascal has once again railed against "climate fanaticism". "The climate has changed throughout the centuries, but I am not a scientist," he said to avoid talking about climate change. And in an attempt to justify his postulates, he stated that "people used to not believe that the earth was round," in the face of applause from the audience and the surprise of Broncano, who today was playing on opposing turf.