A Spanish politician who feels she was wrongly fired by her party after it was revealed that she was claiming travel expenses for commuting from the United States to her job back in Spain wants people to know the naked truth … literally.
Carmen López, a 43-year old former beauty queen who became a lawyer and politician, appeared completely nude on the cover of a Spanish magazine this week in an effort to repair her reputation and tell her side of events.
López said she was forced to relocate to Chicago after her husband found a job as a professor after a stretch of being unemployed. She added that her party, Ciudadanos ("Citizens"), was fully aware of her plans to commute 4,000 or so miles from the Windy City to Seville to attend council meetings.
"I moved [to Chicago] out of absolute economic necessity ... My husband, who is a philologist, was out of work, and I had dedicated my time exclusively to the Ciudadanos party and to local politics – without receiving a penny for it and being supported by my parents," López, who appeared on over a dozen pages of racy photos in the latest edition of Interviú, told the magazine.
"Then after the elections, my husband was assigned a job as a teacher in Chicago through the Education Ministry," she explained.
López also said that her party leaked her expense claim to the media in order to force her out of her job. "I requested to use video conferencing, which is free, but it was denied. It left me no choice," she said, according to the English-language Spanish news outlet, The Local. "The trap was set, and I fell into it."
When the scandal broke, López was quickly asked to leave her post by Ciudadanos leadership as "serving the interests of a small town in Andalucia of about 17,000 inhabitants from over 6,000 kilometers away seems a bit difficult," a party spokesperson said.
López, the former Miss Seville, became Castilleja de la Cuesta's only councilor from the Ciudadanos party in May, when the centrist political party that started in Catalunia for the first time won a number of local and regional elections in other parts of the country.
López's sexy photo shoot isn't a first for politicians. Ciudadanos party founder, Albert Rivera, stripped off his clothes for posters during his first campaign for Parliament in 2006.
Rivera responded to the Interviú magazine cover with a comment on Twitter: "Mine used less Photoshop."
Earlier this year, the Party for Freedom – Clean Hands candidate for mayor in Portugalete in the Basque region of the country, Yolanda Couceiro Morín, also posed naked for campaign posters to dramatize the need for transparency in government. She lost to socialist incumbent, Mikel Torres.
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