“Selfish”, “unsupportive”, “fraudulent”, “extractive”, “oppressive”, “corrupt”. The list of adjectives with which Isabel Díaz Ayusova attacked her opponents yesterday at the weekly plenary of the Madrid Assembly was not far from the usual tension that has been installed for months in the regional chamber. The most innovative thing is that the last recipient of the scomesas has little to do with Madrid politics, rather nothing, since it is Pere Aragonès.
After a question from Vox about the loss of purchasing power of Madrid residents, especially “serious when it comes to buying housing”, Ayuso surprised when he incorporated the president of the Generalitat into the equation, who the day before he had traveled to Madrid to defend the need for a “singular” financing model for Catalonia. To demand “less insults” and “more tax cuts” for the Catalans because, he assured as a spokesperson, “they can’t take it anymore”.
“A lot of TV and the embassy, ??but then there is no water in the taps”, cried Ayuso after hearing the ERC’s proposal to manage 100% of the taxes collected in Catalonia. The Madrid president accused Sánchez’s partners because they “pretend independence at the expense of the money” of others, and pointed out Aragonès as the first of the “extractive class” for “expelling companies” after having created “a machine of the citizen control that suffocates it to taxes and bureaucracy”.
Ayuso also assured that Madrid is the one that finances a large part of the portfolio of public services for a large part of the country. But he put the focus on Catalonia when he erected the community he leads into the “home of welcome for everyone who loses this prosperity (…) It is the people of Madrid who pay for these essential services to other communities”. “What Mr. Aragonès has to do”, he insisted, “is to lower taxes and leave in peace a citizenry that can no longer live with this corruption with which they pay for the maintenance of Mr. Sánchez in the chair.”
Ayuso’s attacks on Aragonès were not the result of improvisation in the heat of the parliamentary debate, but part of a clear strategy of confrontation with the Generalitat, since, after a few minutes of the popular leader’s intervention, the official account of the Madrid PP in X highlighted that “Madrid is growing three points more” than Catalonia after attracting “15,323 million foreign investment in 2023, compared to 4,644 from the Generalitat”.
ERC picked up the gauntlet and immediately upped the ante by emphasizing that Catalonia creates more jobs than Madrid and “concentrates the highest number of innovative companies in Spain to lead industrial production” in the country. “But listen, Ayuso, whenever you want we can debate it face to face with Aragonès”, he challenged the republican formation, and criticized the fact of having been questioned in a regional chamber in which Ayuso knew that ERC has no capacity to respond to their attacks.
