Top party members of the Ciudadanos (Cs) party, including spokeswoman Inés Arrimadas, needed police to escort them away from Madrid’s Gay Pride on Sunday.
The Cs leaders were targeted at the event by a group of protestors who barred their way and shouted at them to ‘get out’ and ‘this is what you get for allying with fascists’. Cs was recently part of a coalition deal to govern Madrid that includes the far-right Vox party.
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The incident came after the festival’s organisers barred the party from adding their own float to the parade, something that Arrimades criticised on Saturday as excluding Cs’ voters, and she accused the organisers of ‘intolerance and discrimination’.
After police escorted the Cs leaders to the safety of the Spanish parliament building, Arrimadas called the attitude of the Pride protestors as ‘shameful’, and she called on the left-wing Socialist (PSOE) and Podemos parties to condemn the incident.
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Responding to the criticisms of her party’s links with Vox, Arrimadas insisted that the agreement is with the right-wing People’s Party (PP), which ‘defends LGBTI policies’, and she argued that ‘we are a party that defends freedom and equality in Madrid’.
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