T.C. | Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the PP president of the Community of Madrid, swept to victory in the elections to the Madrid Assembly and will be able to govern alone. With her 65 deputies (the absolute majority is 69), she will only need the abstention of Vox (13 deputies), the party to her right, to form a government.
With a historic turnout of 76%, the highest in the history of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso got more votes than the sum of PSOE (24 MPs), Podemos (10 MPs) and Más Madrid (24 MPs), the three parties of “the left”, in the language of the Spanish civil war that the tenant of La Moncloa has revived to the displeasure of a large majority of Spaniards.
“Ayuso unleashes a political earthquake: the PSOE’s dismal results and Iglesias’ resignation are a warning to the government”, says El País, the PSOE-leaning newspaper. El As, the sports newspaper of the same group, is blunter about the resignation of Iglesias, the leader of Podemos, who managed for five years to resurrect the language of the Spain of 1936, the Spain of the civil war, and says: “The biggest rat in the history of Spain is leaving”.
The right-wing newspaper ABC says: ‘First warning for Sánchez: a harsh punishment for his management of the pandemic and the crisis, and for his lies’. A digital newspaper synthesises: “Sánchez, hurt. Iglesias, sunk. Madrid mobilises and fiercely punishes the caudillos of the left”.
Isabel Díaz Ayuso has won in 176 of Madrid’s 179 municipalities and in all of the capital’s electoral districts, including the hitherto so-called “red belt”.
In La Moncloa they say that the results “cannot be extrapolated”. And in Genova, the headquarters of the PP, they believe that the countdown to Sánchez’s succession in the Spanish government has begun, although there are many analysts who point out that Pablo Casado, the current leader of the PP, has not managed to engage with the electorate as the president of Madrid has, so that while Casado leads the PP it is very likely that Sánchez – whose government is as legitimate as it is incompetent – will remain in La Moncloa.
