The Madrid Assembly’s investigation committee on the alleged favourable treatment of the Complutense University to the wife of the President of the Government, Begoña Gómez, already has the approval of the plenary session to begin its work in October. The lists of appearances that will be proposed by the parliamentary groups, who want to keep it secret until the first meeting of the committee, are not yet known, but there is a name that is on everyone’s lips and that is the subject of many votes. to appear among the summons: It is that of the wife of Pedro Sánchez.
Neither the PP nor Vox confirm or deny anything at the moment. But both parties say the same thing: they will summon to the commission of inquiry all those who can shed light on the problem they are trying to clarify. And in this case, Begoña Gómez occupies a privileged place. Vox challenged Ayuso’s party to be brave and call Pedro Sánchez’s wife, after the PP refused to do so in the Senate.
But in the Madrid Assembly there is an absolute majority of the PP, of Ayuso’s PP more precisely, and the people of Madrid follow the directives of their boss. Popular sources in Madrid have indicated that the Popular Group of the Assembly has autonomy to make decisions and does not need to seek coordination or approval from the national leadership of the PP in Genoa.
The complete opposite of what is happening within the socialist group. Its spokesperson, Juan Lobato, confirmed yesterday that he is coordinating with Ferraz and the government to define its strategy within the framework of a particularly sensitive commission of inquiry for La Moncloa. Lobato will not participate in this commission – “I can no longer live with this” – but the PSOE representation will be at the forefront, within the group of 27 deputies that it has in the Assembly. Yesterday, it was the deputy spokesperson, Marta Bernardo, Lobato’s right-hand woman, who defended her party’s position.
In the plenary session, the letter of refusal registered by the PSOE was debated, with the aim of stopping the commission of inquiry. The socialists had the support of Más Madrid, but the 54 votes of the two groups were no match for the absolute majority of the 70 deputies of the PP, joined by the 11 of Vox.
The parliamentary debate was bitter from the beginning. According to the PSOE spokesman, it is all due to Ayuso’s “obsession” with Pedro Sánchez. “They want to hurt where it hurts most for each of us, the family.” He also recalled that the intention is to investigate a person who is not currently in politics and that “the Complutense, the Autonomous, the Carlos III or the UNED are of little importance.” “It does not concern them or them.” In his speech, there were several disqualifications of the popular: he called the spokesman, Carlos Díaz-Pache, “sexist,” and he said of the deputy Mercedes Zarzalejo that she is “allegedly immoral and corrupt.” The president of the Assembly, Enrique Ossorio, asked him to withdraw these remarks, but she refused and called him to order.
For Más Madrid, Antonio Sánchez Domínguez argued that it would be much more logical to open a commission of inquiry into the “underfunding” of public universities in recent decades and how the PP “has done everything possible” to destroy it. On the substance, he defended that a chair like that of Begoña Gómez “does not depend on any curriculum vitae” and therefore there can be no irregularity.
For Vox, José Antonio Fúster summed up the left’s position with an expression: “Oh, if it had been the other way around!” His argument was somewhat contradictory. On the one hand, he assured that Vox rejects all the commissions of inquiry because they are “betrayals”. He considers that everything is “another firework by Ayuso to deceive a few more people to appear as Sánchez’s most implacable enemy, when everything is theater, because Ayuso is from the PP, the party that accepted everything with socialism”, here and in Brussels. According to him, opening a parliamentary inquiry into a judicial case is “irresponsible”, but Vox supports it because Sánchez does not support the division of powers and does not respect the judiciary.
PP spokeswoman Mercedes Zarzalejo justified the commission by the “embarrassment” caused by the “brazen, illegal and allegedly corrupt behavior of the president’s wife,” which damaged the image of Complutense.
