Vox accuses Canet council of partisan social media use after PSOE photo mix-up
In Canet d'En Berenguer, a Camp de Morvedre municipality neighbouring Sagunto, Vox has accused the local government of partisan use of its social media after the town hall mistakenly posted photos of the mayor with minister Diana Morant.
A photo posted by mistake has reignited a political row in Canet d'En Berenguer, a Camp de Morvedre municipality neighbouring Sagunto. The town hall's official Facebook page shared several images of the mayor alongside Diana Morant, Spain's Minister of Science, Innovation and Universities and the PSPV-PSOE candidate for the Generalitat Valenciana (Valencian regional government), taken at the Political Conference the Valencian Socialists held in Alicante on Sunday 20 September.
The council itself admits the slip-up: the post was meant for the local PSOE branch's page, not the town hall's, and was corrected within just ten minutes, when the content was pulled from the municipal account and reposted on the party's own page. That swift fix has not stopped Vox, which called the incident "yet another abuse" of the official channels. The party's spokesperson, Juan Francisco Soriano, argues municipal social media should stick to informing residents about council business, and links the episode to a row already raised at the last plenary session by councillor Chordá over interviews with the mayor allegedly paid for out of his own pocket.
The governing team rejects that reading: it maintains that municipal profiles only share institutional information, and that the mayor's public agenda falls within that remit. It insists this was an isolated, quickly corrected error rather than a habit, as the right-wing party suggests. On matters of wider public interest, the local government notes, the usual approach is to inform the media first and only later share it on social media.
Vox's statement does not stop there: it also targets councillor Fermina Huebra, whom it accuses of leaving the local group Vecinos Playa de Canet midway through the term to join the PSOE, and claims she has not tabled a single motion in the municipality's interest throughout the term. The party says it will ask its legal team whether the use of municipal social media could carry legal consequences, though it has not provided documentation to back that claim, and separately calls for greater transparency over several ongoing proceedings it says affect the municipality.
This kind of clash between local governments and opposition parties over institutional accounts is not unique to Canet within Camp de Morvedre: the line between sharing a public official's agenda and doing party propaganda is especially delicate in small municipalities, where the same communication channel serves both neighbourhood announcements and the visibility of local politicians.
The political backdrop to the row has a name: Diana Morant is heading the Socialist ticket for the upcoming regional election while holding two senior posts at once. She has been Minister of Science, Innovation and Universities since November 2023 and, since March 2024, PSPV-PSOE's secretary-general — the first woman to hold that position in the party. That dual role means any institutional post linking her to local officials, such as Canet's mayor, immediately takes on a partisan reading.
Episodes like this are not unusual in Valencian municipal politics: the spread of institutional social media accounts has multiplied this kind of friction between local governments and opposition parties in recent years, especially close to election periods, when mutual scrutiny over the use of official channels intensifies noticeably.
The clash also comes against a political backdrop shaped by the approaching regional election, in which Compromís, PSPV-PSOE, PP and Vox will also compete for representation of municipalities such as Canet d'En Berenguer within the Valencia constituency, adding tension to any episode with a partisan reading in the district.
In town halls of a similar size to Canet's, managing institutional social media accounts often falls to communications staff who combine that task with other administrative duties, which in practice makes this kind of mistake more likely when parallel accounts — the institutional one and the governing party's — are often managed from the same devices or by the same people.
Vox has turned monitoring the use of institutional social media into one of its regular lines of work across several Camp de Morvedre municipalities, a strategy the party defends as democratic oversight of public spending and communication, while the governing teams affected generally see it as part of the ordinary political confrontation that comes with opposition. Beyond this specific episode, the case again raises the need for clear protocols governing the use of institutional profiles in the district's smaller municipalities, where communication resources tend to be limited.
According to El Periódico de Aquí, with additional background from Wikipedia on Diana Morant.