“When you think about Catalonia, what you see is an opportunity for conflict, and I, a strategic ally for the future; When he looks at Malaga, he sees a city that steals startups from us, and what I see is an allied technological hub two hours from AVE, and when he sets his sights on Valencia, he thinks if the PP there will support him when it’s time, and What I see is the port of Madrid, three hours away by road,” Juan Lobato exclaimed in the plenary session of the Madrid Assembly last Friday.
This has been the last occasion in which the Madrid socialist leader has tried at this beginning of the legislature to contrast his project of “collaborative leadership” for Madrid with the “exclusive” model of the president of the Community, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, who, However, it has proven to be successful at the regional level, since it has gone from 30 to 70 seats in four years, while, in that same time, the PSOE-M has fallen from 37 to 27 deputies.
Despite this, the head of the Madrid socialists believes he has found a weak point through which to wear down the president of the Community. First from Madrid outwards, to, if achieved, reformulate it at the regional level.
And Lobato is in those. On the one hand, repeatedly reproaching Ayuso for using any national issue “as a smokescreen to hide” his management of the region: “The Spain that we have built together is not broken by Catalonia as he never tires of repeating, but is “It breaks when, for example, there are a million people on health waiting lists,” he reproached him.
And on the other hand, accentuating the “unsupportive” profile of the president of the Community, whom he accuses of seeking “permanent conflict.”
Socialist sources abound in this purpose. They assure that Ayuso is a “Madrid nationalist” product that not only constantly confronts the acting President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, but also does so against “the group of communities.”
To do this, they list points of friction such as “fiscal dumping – tax advantages offered by some states or regions to attract companies and individuals – from the capital, which, with its recurring tax cuts, “harms other regions so much,” without forgetting how in a pandemic “he put the economy before health by decreeing more lax sanitary restrictions and challenging the perimeter closures between territories while opening the shutters of restaurants and theaters despite the risk of multiplying the transmission of covid infections” to neighboring communities.
Until the last regional elections in May, Ayuso had it in his sights, given that clashing with Aragón, the Valencian Community, Extremadura or La Rioja was part of his logic as the battering ram of the PP against the PSOE. But now that the popular ones have reconquered a good handful of regional governments at the polls, the socialists predict that it will be much more difficult for the Madrid president to accentuate the capital effect of Madrid, with which, as the former president of the Valencian Generalitat Ximo Puig, benefits from its vacuuming power and “encourages inequality in Spain.”
The strategy of the PSOE of Madrid comes at the start of the political course in which the regional leader of the PP has begun at a slow pace and with hardly any parliamentary production – except for a non-law proposal on cybersecurity – as she has one eye on the investiture process Statewide. More than 100 days in office in which Ayuso has also avoided any internal conflict with the increasingly less discussed president of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, despite which he continues to appear in all the pools to attack the leadership national in case the current project of the former Galician president threatens to collapse.
The socialists, just in case, don’t trust it. “Although, as he says, he would not want to aspire to preside over the national PP, Ayuso cannot allow himself to look weak outside of Madrid.”
