Following what was a chaotic day Thursday 23rd May, I thought that I should not resign from the party, but speaking to my wife and son it now seems to be the best option, WHY? The simple fact is that PIOC has gone from a democratic party to a dictatorship because of the actions of the President.
He said, and I quote “Neither the vice president nor the secretary general may overrule the president” then without consulting the committee, the extended committee and membership, he went and deleted me from the PIOC group chat and from the executive group chat, even though I was legitimately elected as vice president at the AGM.
He also did the same thing to my wife while we are out of the country. That is not democracy in action.
The friction between the President and my self-started at the beginning of 2022 when I was begging him to start the paperwork to become a legal party, but I was constantly dismissed.
He finally started very late in the year but knowing how Spanish bureaucracy works he should have realised that it would take much longer than envisaged and as such, when we did become legal towards the end of September 2022, it left us very little time to gain memberships. We were close to a disaster.
When the time came to put our candidate list together, because we were very short of members we had to ask family, friends, friends of families even those who lived way up in the north of Spain to be our candidates.
When that was sorted, Norah Bond asked for a working group to help with the elections, but the President turned it down. I asked for representatives from the party to be at the polling stations on the day of the elections. He turned that down also and we were visibly missed.
What turned out to be a success for us in the elections as due the hard work and effort by myself and Priscilla, being out there every day, holding clinics, meetings etc. We delivered just under 1,400 votes, just short of a councillor.
The problems between Roman and I really started shortly after the elections. He spoke to me privately, he then started to take screen prints of issues and published them on our executive chat, my grammar, spelling etc, which I saw as an effort to undermine me. I didn’t know what his problem was. Could it be that we did far better in the elections than he really expected, did he feel threatened, jealous. I wish I knew!
Then came the elections for the district boards. Yet again, because of the hard work by Cilla and myself, 5 candidates, all members of PIOC, were elected on to the boards.
The deletion of messages and of members who have an opinion, which may not be in line with his own, is an act of a dictator.
Once you silence any opposition you can distort the truth to suit your own agenda. Instead of debating the issues, the person who is on the losing side of the argument shuts down the opposition.
