The current mayor of Soria, Guillermo Besozzi, made a notable difference in the internal elections leading up to the departmental elections in May 2025. He was positioned as the favorite to assume the municipal seat for the fourth time.
He is hurt by the surprise appointment of Valeria Ripoll as the National Party’s vice presidential candidate: “I found out about it on TV.”
After the results of the internal elections of last Sunday 30th were known, Besozzi’s first reflection in an interview with EL ECO was: “We have to analyse the political system as a whole, why so few people voted. We don’t inspire people much and there could be several reasons: they feel that things are more or less fine, so it doesn’t matter if we go around making big changes. Another reason is that we bore people seeing the insults and offences to others and we go beyond the limits of our parties, when it was an internal issue. We often end up insulting each other, speaking badly of each other. We go beyond the limits of what good manners mean in politics. That bores people, tires them out and they don’t vote.”
The low vote “does not give us a clear vision for October, neither at the national level nor at the departmental level, because the sample is very small. Mind you, it is nice to see, to draw conclusions, but always keeping in mind that it is an internal election. Now we are going to go to October and we could be surprised precisely because the internal election has not been so representative due to the low vote.”
Álvaro Delgado’s announcement that he had appointed Valeria Ripoll as vice-president on the nationalist ticket, took Besozzi from Laura Raffo’s sector by surprise. “I didn’t know, I found out on TV. It hurt me. Maybe, if I think about the ticket, I could agree today, because politics is a game of strategic chess and our party has always had the vocation to accommodate people, even if they come from other parties.”
I was hurt by the way it was announced. “I would have liked to participate” in the decision, “not because I believe that my opinion should be taken into account, but I would have liked to think about the issue a little. I understand it and I think that there is a strategy behind it that is good. This woman (Ripoll) is phenomenal, I have been with her two or three times and she has a great attitude, she is a politician who has made her way alone, she has no surname, nobody helped her and she has earned her places alone, both on the left and today with us,” he said.
October is coming and May is coming out of the corner of my eye
With an eye on the national elections in October and without losing sight of the departmental elections in May 2025, Besozzi points out that in the national elections he will be on some list for the Senate. “I will be supporting whoever is the candidate for deputy for our line, but I will not resign (as mayor) to be a candidate for deputy.”
In any case, his main interest is “focusing on the mayoralty in May of next year.” In the primaries “four lists supported me and between them we got 40% of the delegates so that I could be a candidate” for mayor. “I am calm and I only have words of gratitude for the four lists,” he expressed.
He will remain at the head of the Soriano mayor’s office “until February” 2025; when “I have to resign because I am on a list for the Senate. “This” departmental “period has been shorter than normal due to the six months that the pandemic stole from us. I have to conclude a lot of issues that I have started, which I want to finish. Also because I feel much more about the role in the mayor’s office than in the legislature, so I prefer to stay here and stay close to my people,” said the mayor.
