When you think of Catalonia, what you see is an opportunity for conflict, and I, a strategic ally of the future; when he looks at Málaga, he sees a city that steals startups from us, and what I see is an allied technological hub two hours from the AVE, and when he sets his sights on Valencia, he thinks if the PP there will support him when touch, and what I see there is the port of Madrid three hours away by road”, exclaimed Juan Lobato in the plenary of the Assembly of Madrid, on Friday.
This was the last time that the Madrid socialist leader tried in this beginning of the legislature to contrast his “collaborative leadership” project for Madrid with the “exclusionary” model of the president of the Community, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, which, even so, has shown that it is successful at the regional level, since it has gone from 30 to 70 seats in four years, while, in the same time, the PSOE-M has fallen from 37 to 27 deputies.
Nevertheless, the head of the Madrid socialists believes that he has found a weak point with which to wear down the president of the Community. First, from Madrid outwards, in order, in the event of achieving this, to reformulate it into an autonomous excala.
And Lobato will focus his efforts on this goal. On the one hand, repeatedly reproaching Ayuso for using any state affair “as a smoke screen to hide” his management of the region: “The Spain we have built together is not broken by Catalonia, as he never gets tired of repeating , but it breaks down when, for example, there are a million people on healthcare waiting lists”, he reprimanded him.
And on the other, accentuating the “non-solidarity” profile of the president of the Community, whom he accuses of seeking “permanent conflict”.
Socialist sources point towards this purpose. They assure that Ayuso is a “nationalist Madrid” product that not only constantly confronts the acting president of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, but also confronts “the whole community”.
For this reason, they list points of friction such as “fiscal dumping – tax advantages offered by some states or regions in order to attract companies and individuals – of the capital, which, with its recurring tax reductions, “damages so much other regions ”, without forgetting how during the pandemic “he put the economy ahead of health by decreeing looser health restrictions and defying 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 regional elections last May, Ayuso had it in his face, since clashing with Aragon, the Valencian Community, Extremadura or La Rioja was part of his logic of battering the PP against the PSOE. But now that the populists have won back a handful of regional governments at the polls, the socialists predict that it will be much more difficult for the president from Madrid to accentuate the capital city effect of Madrid, which, as the former president of the Generalitat Valenciana has repeatedly denounced Ximo Puig, benefits from its suction power and “encourages inequality in Spain”.
The strategy of the PSOE in Madrid comes at the start of a political course that the regional leader of the PP has started at idle and with almost no parliamentary production – apart from a non-law proposal on cyber security – because she has an eye on the process of investiture at state level. It is already more than a hundred days in office in which Ayuso, moreover, has avoided any internal conflict with the less and less discussed president of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, although he does not cease to appear in every way to attack the leadership of the party in case the current project of the former Galician president threatens to collapse.
The socialists, just in case, do not rely on it: “Even if, as he says, he did not want to aspire to preside over the national PP, Ayuso cannot afford to be seen as weak outside of Madrid”.
