Last week, the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, publicly asked the rest of the regional presidents of the PP “not to adhere to the strategy of [Pedro] Sanchez nor his accomplice [María Jesús] Montero” in regional financing and that they do not come individually but all together if they are summoned by the President of the Government because he “will corrupt them one by one in Moncloa.”
The word accomplice has a meaning that does not refer to criminal acts, but when it comes to corruption, there is no doubt: all its forms and modalities are provided for in the Penal Code. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about Díaz Ayuso’s expression is not that he considers Sánchez a possible bribe-taker (he has given him stronger names) but that he considers the other regional presidents, his coreligionists, as easily bribed.
For some time now, many politicians have been too slow. They violate excessively frequently with their rivals not only the most elementary rules of courtesy and respect, but they even inflict on them chains of insults, slander and calumnies that would end up in the judicial field if it were not for the self-protection that politicians themselves have given themselves with their inviolability, their immunities and their limitations. Knowing that they are now immune, they believe themselves to be eternally unpunished.
The aforementioned Pedro Sánchez has also been involved in a notable verbal excess and a disconcerting alleged lexical error in recent days. The first, when on Saturday, September 7, in his speech before the PSOE Federal Committee, he said this: “We are going to move forward with determination, with or without the support of the opposition, with or without the help of a legislative power that must necessarily be more constructive and less restrictive. The criticisms immediately rain down on him, some very well-founded. That he does not believe in the division of powers, that he is not a democrat, that he is an autocrat…
So many rivers of press ink and minutes of television and radio have consumed the controversy that this Wednesday the President of the Government was forced to rectify halfway. He assured that he had “the greatest respect” for the parliamentary groups and that he would build bridges, but at the same time “he will not abandon a roadmap and an agenda for this political journey.” That is, resilience, a word that Sánchez and his entourage have introduced into our daily lexicon after the pandemic and that remains for the moment in popular use (sometimes, jokingly, with an ironic meaning).
Sánchez’s alleged lexical error occurred a few days earlier, on Tuesday 5th, when during an event at the Cervantes Institute (temple of language, look where) he said: “Spain will be a better country if there are more electric cars and more public buses and fewer Lamborghinis.
It seems – hence the presumption – that the luxury car brand that the president was supposed to mention was not Lamborghini but Maserati. Why? Because according to court documents, Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s boyfriend, the businessman investigated for tax fraud Alberto González Amador – a confessed criminal, since he admitted to the fraud -, bought a Maserati that costs more than 80,000 euros with part of the unpaid taxes, which has accumulated debts for traffic fines and municipal taxes and is sometimes used by the president of the Community of Madrid herself.
Lamborghini, Maserati. Both luxury car brands; both Italian; both, with that ending that sounds like a diminutive (in reality, they are the names of the respective founders of the brands)… Anyone can be wrong, errare humanum est and this or that… But wasting this verbal arrow against a rival expert in verbal excess is unworthy of the villain -for his rivals- and astute -for his supporters- Pedro Sánchez.
