The transition from athletics to politics has forced Roberto Sotomayor (Madrid, 1977) to hang up his technical shirt and tights. But the three-time European champion on the indoor track continues to stomp as hard as he did when he did it in the tartan. And with that fast step that he maintains – and that for many is almost going at a trot – he has kicked around the neighborhoods of Madrid, the city for whose mayoralty he is presenting himself as a candidate this 28-M under the acronym of Podemos.
He wants so much to enter the City Council that he has even attended the last municipal plenary sessions despite not having a seat. In his cafeteria, he attends to La Vanguardia, and recounts his project loud and clear to make sure that his political rivals who pause before returning to the chamber listen to him. “There is no time to lose, Madrid has lost four years with Mr. Almeida and the people of Madrid cannot afford to lose four more” (…) “Especially the most disadvantaged and those who live in peripheral neighborhoods because Madrid is the two speeds that the PP has imposed is leaving many people behind,” comments Sotomayor, revealing that social justice is the basis on which his project pivots.
“It is that in Madrid it has been governed from closed offices and with its back turned to the citizens, that is why Podemos is committed to participatory democracy that involves the citizenry and allows people to recover their space in the political discussion,” adds the one who combined his sports career with his job as a clerk at El Corte Inglés.
From his process of listening to the neighborhoods, he has taken note of the “non-negotiable fiscal justice” that the capital lacks and that “forces its representatives to act” in areas such as the public rental housing stock and the improvement of infrastructures educational, sports and cultural.
Sotomayor is the first Podemos candidate for Mayor of Madrid after the purple formation preferred not to present its own list either in 2015, when it supported Manuela Carmena (Ahora Madrid), or in 2019, when after the pact between the former mayor and of its former founder, Ãñigo Errejón, asked for the vote for Madrid in Pie Municipalista. The umpteenth representation of the Russian matrioshkas in which the left has been divided in Madrid. And 5% of the vote is the minimum mark you must achieve at the polls to gain parliamentary representation.
“It’s not going to be easy. Not running in 2019 was a mistake because running a campaign with hardly any means and having no representation complicates it, but we’re very close,” he sums up with the same determination with which he has garnered an impressive sports record based on the “struggle” of those who never give anything for impossible.
The former athlete, in fact, would have preferred to attend 28-M within a large coalition of the left. In fact, he defends that “We can propose it a few months ago to both IU and Más Madrid”, but regrets that the latter “rejected” it.
A lack of “courage” that he has also perceived in the work of the opposition to the bipartite government of PP and Cs in Cibeles. “There are not a few major scandals that Almeida has starred in, but the opposition has not managed to take its toll on his image as mayor,” he concludes days after denouncing to the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor the alleged “prevarication or favorable treatment” in the two contracts that the City Council of the capital has awarded to the company where the brother of the Environment and Mobility delegate, Borja Carabante, works for a possible crime of prevarication and influence peddling.
Despite the fact that the mayor has not been squeezed enough, he is “optimistic” in the face of the elections. The important thing is that “no progressive vote stays at home” on the 28th to “get the worst mayor in the history of Madrid out of Cibeles”, he assures before pausing the interview to have one with one of the catering managers. municipal.
Sustainability is another of the axes that the candidate verbalizes the most when outlining the Madrid of Podemos. With a mobility model that articulates a passable, efficient and sustainable city. Something that he hopes to achieve by offering “progressive free public transport” for those registered in the city, in addition to demanding “more funding, buses, and metro frequencies to connect isolated neighborhoods and PAUs” with which the City Council has a debt. historical”.
