Barely five minutes had passed since her speech on the state of the region and Isabel Díaz Ayuso was already shaking Pedro Sánchez’s doll. The goat is heading for the mountain, where it will eventually find the long-resident president of Madrid, stumbling and announcing to the Spanish people the abysses they face. Her public appearances are like those horror films that alternate between peaceful moments and hair-raising scares. All is well in Madrid, while Spain is about to perish. It is difficult to assimilate the two ideas simultaneously, but she has always thought that coherence is overrated.
On this occasion, he did not disappoint his very varied fan clubs, some of which are certainly not subsidized by their government (the same cannot be said of the other guilds). He could not miss a sentence in which the word “dictatorship” appeared, referring to the present and not to the Francoist past. We are witnessing, he declared, “how a dictatorship is being built before our eyes.” While it is normal for the public to be discouraged by such a prospect, Ayuso suddenly changes course with fantastic expectations. “The independence of Catalonia will break out sooner than that of Spain and the Community of Madrid,” he predicted. The dictatorship is looming, but above all, a lot of calm.
The leader of the Madrid PP has drawn up a long list of issues in which the central government is indebted to the Community of Madrid. But in the end, Ayuso Cheli appears and acts wonderfully and declares that Madrid does not need anyone: “We do not ask anything from the government. Do not hold back.” All at the same time and at the same time.
Ayuso has just become aware of the limits of his power as spiritual guide of the Popular Party. He was returning from vacation giving orders to the regional barons so that they would not have the idea, so credulous, of agreeing to meet Sánchez in Moncloa, because he was going to deceive them or, worse, “bribe” them. This is not your case, since your registration was taken a long time ago.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo agreed with his regional presidents that they would not negotiate regional funding separately. This does not prevent several of them from announcing that they have no problem going to Moncloa, because there are many issues to discuss with the central government. They could not tell their voters that they do not dare to defend the interests of their community where it is necessary. Ayuso prefers to remain entrenched in the Sierra Maestra of Madrid at the head of her insurgent movement.
The title of Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, her chief of staff, is sharp before these speeches. The only problem is that the president improvises too much in some interviews, especially if she makes forays into history in which she ends up falling off her horse with a crash. In addition to the tax cuts, now almost customary, the news of this plenary session was the announcement of the future approval of a comprehensive plan against drugs, the first to be approved in Madrid after several decades of government by the Popular Party.
Ayuso has been talking for some time about the danger of drugs, which she associates with a kind of relaxation of morals in society. It is an effective claim to the voter in favour of law and order. He tends to exaggerate with some examples. “Drugs destroy lives,” he says, and he is right. The only thing is that some of his statements, such as the one that states that “marijuana is the drug that destroys the most lives, especially those of young people,” are very questionable. The problem of drug addiction in Spain, and especially in Madrid, was much more serious in the 1980s, and its origin was heroin.
The exotic comment of the week, who knows where it comes from, was uttered the day before in an interview: “Drugs were never typical of the West. They came from other cultures. Over the centuries, we were never like other Orientals, who immersed themselves in them. However, there is now an excessive interest in stealthily integrating them into our society.” Here, it is time to include an ejaculation: Mary Beard, save us from so much ignorance.
Ancient historians would be perplexed to hear this. They know that the Greeks and Romans, especially their elites, were very familiar with opium and cannabis. Whatever the initial origin of the product, the West was always attracted to stimulant or hallucinogenic substances until the explosion of the 20th century. The British went to war with China in the 19th century to prevent the ban on the opium trade.
The ultimate intention is to blame the left for the bad things in society. “The left feeds” this drug use, Ayuso says, “because it needs to keep people in poverty, in division, without missing stimulus measures.” You start as a young man smoking a few joints and end up in poverty voting for Sánchez with a dull and apathetic mind.
In general, she does not trust young people very much. He has already said on several occasions that the problem with young people in Spain is that “they have everything”. These lazy people addicted to new technologies do not have a “culture of effort”.
Other controversies have given rise to another new proposal from the Madrilenian: to open a specialized center, the first in Spain, for male victims of sexual violence. This is an old demand of the extreme right on social networks, determined to denounce that the law discriminates against men, and not women, against all evidence, not only in terms of sexual freedom, but in many other areas. Before speculating on the political intention of this idea, it is necessary to remember that men are also victims of sexual violence, although far from the percentages suffered by women.
In 2023, 428 men were victims of sexual abuse and assault with penetration throughout Spain, according to statistics from the Ministry of the Interior. The number of women was 4,098, representing 90.6%. For all crimes against sexual freedom, female victims represented 86% and male victims 14%. The most common is that male victims were attacked by other men.
The community will spend 700,000 euros on this center. This figure is not extraordinary within the regional budget. It has an interesting political additive. It could enrage the feminist movement, which would be a plus for many Ayuso voters and some Vox voters. “This announcement seems to me to be a mockery of the victims of sexist violence and a provocation towards the feminist movement,” said Manuela Bergerot, leader of Más Madrid in the Assembly.
The socialist Juan Lobato saw things differently: “With me, he can no longer get me on the hook that he puts on us.” There are always headlines like these on big occasions, generated to remind the right that no one bothers the left like Ayuso.
Then there is the question of governing, which is not so complicated either and relies heavily on recycling. There were dozens of promises in the speech. Some were already known to the opposition. “A repeat of last year,” Bergerot said.
The most hilarious example was the announcement of the integrated social card to access all social services in the community. This is a very old commitment of the PP – recalled Emilio Delgado, deputy of Más Madrid – which it made for the first time in 2003 and which it repeats periodically, as Ayuso does now.
She hopes that no one will remember if this card is forgotten and remains in the drawer for more than twenty years or if the promised health centers do not exist. What matters is that everyone knows how much they hate Sánchez and those reds who cling to such terrible threats as cannabis and high taxes. With this alone you win the elections in Madrid.
