Isabel Díaz Ayuso has taken office this Friday as president of the Community of Madrid, carrying out a strong defense of her recently appointed Executive -marked by an eminently technical and young profile- and vindicating the political worth of the Transition generation to lead change in Spain.
Assuming the ideological helm of her management in the first person, the Madrid leader has shielded her new structure from critical voices that are suspicious of youth and the lack of political weight of its members. “They represent a respectful and faithful Spain, which works hard, and has formed conscientiously. It is also a generation that asks for a step because the time has come.”
“This is my generation: we are those born around 1977, children of the Transition, to which we owe so much,” he added before an audience full of national and regional authorities of the PP that, in many cases, is far removed from that generation claimed by Ayuso. Starting with the national leader of the popular, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, sitting in the front row.
Ayuso has parked his usual combative and confrontational discourse with the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, and has made a more institutional intervention with hardly any explicit references to his political rivals. Neither those located to the left of him nor the one seated at the right end. And he has placed resentment as one of the current ills of politics: “That grudge against everything beautiful and good that there is in life, in ourselves and in others, and that seized us at the worst moment of our history, in the fratricidal war that they want to unearth, to lead us to destroy ourselves in grievances, division and grudges”, he stressed as an indirect message to the historical memory policies deployed by the Government of the PSOE and United We Can.
The cordiality of the event held in the courtyard of the Real Casa de Correos de Sol contrasts with what was experienced in that same place just a month and a half ago when the president’s protocol team blocked Minister Bolaños’s access to the authorities’ platform.
Díaz Ayuso has taken office after being sworn in as president with an absolute majority of the PP, so for the first time she will lead the region without depending on third parties, after governing in coalition with Ciudadanos in 2019 and with external support from Vox in 2021.
The Madrid president will lead a government that maintains nine ministries and where she has completely renewed those responsible, with six and three female advisers.
