The Vox councilor in the Madrid City Council Ignacio Ansaldo has announced that he has been expelled from the party. The councilor, who holds the party's number one membership card and is one of its founders, is politically aligned with fellow councilor Javier Ortega Smith within the municipal group.
"Today I have been expelled from my party", Ansaldo wrote on his X account, in a message accompanied by an emoji with a tearful expression. The expulsion comes after Vox provisionally suspended his membership on February 23, the same day it adopted the same measure against the deputy spokesperson of the municipal group, Carla Toscano, also close to Ortega Smith.
Both proceedings occurred five days after the party made a similar decision against Ortega Smith. Vox's leadership provisionally suspended his membership for "disobeying" a resolution of the National Executive Committee (CEN) that established his dismissal as the party's spokesperson in the Madrid City Council.
The situation ended up escalating and on March 6 Ortega Smith was definitively expelled from the formation. The Guarantees Committee of the party that Santiago Abascal leads attributed to him a "very serious infraction" for frustrating the replacement in the municipal spokespersonship.
After that decision, Vox's leadership appointed councilor Arantxa Cabello as the group's new spokesperson in the Madrid City Council and reorganized the team, made up of five councilors. Since then, the municipal group has remained divided: Cabello has the support of the group's general secretary, Fernando Martínez Vidal, while Ansaldo and Toscano have remained aligned with Ortega Smith.
