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Date Published: 31/05/2023

Gay pornstar and a pair of potheads: The most surprising new councilmen in the Spanish election

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Gay pornstar and a pair of potheads: The most surprising new councilmen in the Spanish election

The thrashing the governing Socialist PSOE party took at last weekend’s election hasn’t been the only surprise at the Spanish polls, and to say some of the emerging new councillors are colourful characters is something of an understatement.

For the first time ever in Europe, two pro-cannabis councillors have been elected to local government. The little-known Partido Cannábico-Luz Verde, which advocates legalising marijuana, was only represented in three municipalities in Spain, but in the Navarra town of Murillo el Fruto, Andrés Vallés and Germán Daniel Lanas (pictured) accepted their hard-won seats “with pride.”

The councilmen thanked “all the people who have voted for us in these, our first elections, watering the seed of the legalisation of democratic cannabis courageously planted by the three candidacies of Madrid, Barcelona and Murillo el Fruto.

Many councillors come from backgrounds outside of politics – the current President, Pedro Sánchez, was working in admin before he was elected – but the alternative career of Albacete’s new candidate for Partido Popular (PP) has raised one or two eyebrows, and more than a few blushes.

Known as Héctor de Silva in his heyday, 38-year-old newly-elected mayor of Carcelén, Antonio Moreno, once spent a year and a half working as a porn actor. Moreno has been running a cattle farm in the Albacete town for the past six years, but he made no bones about his past when running for office.

“It is a time in my life that both my partner and everyone in the town knew from the beginning, I have never hidden anything,” said Moreno, who claims that it was the conservative PP who first approached him about running.

Others, meanwhile, missed out on the chance of being elected. Well before the devastating outcome of the elections for the Socialists was known, PSOE candidate Óscar Puentes, sitting mayor of the city of Valladolid, experienced plenty of embarrassment when he turned up to cast his vote without his DNI (Spanish citizen identity card).

The sitting mayor had to stand on the sidelines and wait for a friend to rush his identity document over to the polling station before he was allowed to cast his vote.

He went on to lose his mayorship.

Now read: New Spanish election date leaves more than 60 laws in the pipeline

Image: Partido Cannábico-Luz Verde

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