Mockery, laughter and even jokes in bad taste. The scandal led by Sumar’s former spokesperson, Iñigo Errejón, whom several women accuse of sexist behavior and one of them denounced him for sexual assault, served both the mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez Almeida, and the president of the Community, Isabel Díaz. Ayuso, as ammunition to mercilessly attack the two left-wing opposition groups, Más Madrid and PSOE, and, incidentally, to disqualify the entire feminist movement.
After the affair broke out, the mayor was quick to use the thorny issue as a weapon. First and foremost against the municipal spokesperson, Rita Maestre – who was Errejón’s partner – whom he accused of “knowing everything” and “hiding it”. And incidentally against the socialist Reyes Maroto. The advisor was extremely harsh in the duel he had with both of them during the last plenary session of Cibeles. “What’s really disgusting is that they covered it up. And they did this not to protect the victims, but to protect themselves, Yolanda Díaz, the Minister of Health, Mónica García, and you as head of Más Madrid,” the councilor told Maestre. between two gestures of reproach. a bench of opposition groups, who accused him of being “sexist”.
Meanwhile, Ayuso took the first opportunity she got to use the scandal as vendetta against Más Madrid’s spokesperson in the Assembly, Manuela Bergerot – and, therefore, against her companion and predecessor in power, Mónica García – for putting her on the ropes in the case of her partner, Alberto González Amador , while waiting to confirm his conviction for tax fraud. “Did you ask me about the weather or the climax?” Because if your party knows something, it gets heated,” he sarcastically asked Bergerot during the government control session held this Thursday at the Madrid Assembly. “Tell me, my friend, I believe you: are they going to benefit Errejón with their yes-yes law”, she then mocked, to the great pleasure of the deputies – and many female deputies – of his parliamentary group.
At the end of October, the mayor of Madrid had already succeeded in revolting the left by declaring that if the protagonist of a sexual assault scandal like the one in which Errejón is involved was a PP official, “the feminist movement would demonstrate every day. » in the streets. In a message posted online on X, the Madrid councilor expressed this idea with irony.
a few days later, During the last plenary session held in Cibeles that same October, Almeida was the protagonist of a noisy fight with the municipal spokesperson of Más Madrid, Rita Maestre – whose party Errejón still belongs to – and with that of the PSOE, Reyes Maroto, for once again using this issue as a political battering ram against both of them and against the whole of the feminist movement. In a climate of maximum tension and following questions unrelated to this scandal, both accused him of being “sexist” and asked him to withdraw his jokes and what he had said a few moments earlier in session plenary. The Madrid councilor declared that he found the “silence of all these years” regarding the behavior of Sumar’s former spokesperson “repugnant”. “You knew it and you hid it” and he added that they forced him to resign only when “they saw that he was taking over” Mónica García and Yolanda Díaz, respectively leaders of Más Madrid and Sumar.
“What feminism has defended is that machismo, sexual assault and patriarchal attitudes are transversal in all parties,” replied, very annoyed, Maestre, who, like Maroto, mentioned the case, at the he era of José María Aznar, of Nevenka Fernández, the former councilor of Ponferrada (León) harassed by the former mayor of this party, Ismael Álvarez. The councilor, who was the first politician denounced for this offense, was finally sentenced to nine months in prison, in addition to paying a fine of 6,480 euros and compensation of 12,000 euros to Nevenka, thus being able to continue his hospitality and nightlife activities. until his brief return to politics a decade later. The exedile, on the contrary, was forced to leave Spain due to the rejection of her former colleagues and the numerous criticisms of her own neighbors. The PP did not lift a finger to protect her while saluting the “courage” of the mayor in his resignation, without condemning his attitude.
The PP’s reaction to the serious accusations of sexual harassment launched by various women against tenor Plácido Domingo, which kept him away from the stage for a season, was also revealed. At the time, Almeida apologized, assuring that “the mere existence of irregular behavior does not invalidate a person’s career either.” Ayuso, for his part, assured that it was necessary to separate “the professional from the person” and complimented him when the ABC newspaper, in the midst of the controversy, published an interview with him: “The greatest”, declared the regional president of Madrid. in X.
The tension during this municipal plenary session increased, to the point that Borja Fanjul, its president – from the PP – had to call even the mayor himself to order. “Their laughter and their smiles are repulsive and disgusting when they talk about sexual assault, when they talk about victims, when they talk about such important topics. “Your laughter is shameful,” shouted Maestre, who reproached the councilor: “You have come to attack me and feminism,” he lamented. He then explained that “the difference between a party of the left and a party of the right is not the number of sexists it contains, but the number of feminists who fight to expel the sexists as soon as they become aware of the first attack. the first attitude. This is exactly the difference between us and you.
The same indignation was expressed by Reyes Maroto, whom Almeida had also attacked for “corruption” of the government and had accused of “covering up” Errejón: “There is a predator, as Más Madrid and his brand said, who has been undercover for a year and you, in order not to break up a coalition government, remain silent.” According to him, the one who had to resign is “the one who allowed Koldo, Aldama and a businessman to meet in his meeting room at the Ministry of Industry”, headed by Maroto before arriving at City Hall from Madrid.
Ayuso uses Errejón to attack Bergerot
The issue of Errejón’s resignation due to his inappropriate sexual behavior only came to the Madrid Assembly on Thursday, simply as a matter of scheduling; Sumar’s former spokesperson submitted his resignation just hours after the plenary session on the 24th, and the following week the regional Parliament did not hold a session in the Chamber.
Until then, the regional president had limited herself to attacking the group of Mónica García and Manuela Bergerot as “spokespersons for feminism”, while they “hid” and concealed the behavior of the former spokesperson for Sumar . At the end of October, during a PP event in the town of O Porriño in Pontevedra, where Ayuso coincided with the mayor of Madrid, the Madrid leader attacked Más Madrid, assuring that Errejón and “many leaders of his party and partners » had made “the flag of feminism”, and they are “hypocrites” because “they are involved in all kinds of causes, which always have to do with violence against women”.
The disaster of the storm in Valencia moved the issue to the political and informational front, but the spokesperson for Más Madrid, Manuela Bergerot, felt obliged to make an allusion during Thursday’s session, with a message for the PP. “We guarantee that playing politics in our spaces is incompatible with the exercise of gender-based violence, no matter who falls. That’s the difference between us and all you people who just sit around [en el escaño] to accusations of corruption [Ana Millán, número 3 del PP madrileño y vicepresidenta de la Asamblea] and they have no qualms about entering into government pacts with those convicted of gender-based violence [en la Comunitat Valenciana, aunque el diputado en cuestión renunció para facilitar el pacto]”.
As often happens in her debates with the opposition, Isabel Díaz Ayuso did not respond directly, but read an already prepared speech, in the form of rhetorical questions in a humorous tone, in which she mixed Errejón with Pablo Iglesias, the law of yes. it is yes or even the trans law, whose own reform in Madrid, the PP had to modify on the recommendation of the Council of State. “Did you ask me about the weather or the climax?” Because if there’s one thing his game knows, it’s warming up, he quipped. “Tell me, my friend, I believe you: will they benefit Errejón with their yes, it’s yes law? When they came from the other party, wasn’t it also called Unidas Podemos around the alpha male so he could give us a list? Did they come home alone and drunk when they went out at night with Errejón? “Is it micro-machismo to want to whip a journalist until she bleeds?” he bombarded Bergerot. This last allusion concerned certain conversations intercepted by Pablo Iglesias and certain sentences from a private messaging conversation for which the former vice-president of the government had come to apologize. It was in 2018.
But Ayuso continues, excited: “Did they then pay Mr. Errejón for a course on deconstruction of masculinities and the fight against heteropatriarchal machismo? How much money did they take from the purple dots? Will they continue to erase women with their sectarian laws, including trans law? Then he got involved in a jumble that was intended to be an amendment to all of the recent years of political action by the feminist left: “Their ideas are always bad; They are disastrous, they are traps and in all of them they have despised women and taken the opportunity to go against the rule of law, the presumption of innocence, the effective protection of judges, courts, by ending the legal guarantee, by treating women like ‘Poor thing, everything you say is true because you are a woman’, by reversing the burden of proof and now it turns out that it is the ‘Rule of law that will have to support Errejón. “Isn’t that poetic justice?” » the regional president continued to insist.
In his report, Ayuso forgot to mention the only issue that directly affects the Assembly itself, namely the late resignation of the Más Madrid deputy, Loreto Arenillas, singled out by the party leadership for having minimized a another alleged sexual assault by Errejón in 2023, and who has not yet submitted the report.
