2024, the year of battle for the leadership of the left against Ayuso in Madrid

The year 2024 begins with the Madrid left in a labyrinth. The departure of Mónica García (Más Madrid), who has become Minister of Health of the Government headed by Pedro Sánchez, opens a new stage in regional politics. Manuela Bergerot will give voice and face to the day-to-day life of a party that faces the double challenge of leading the opposition to Isabel Díaz Ayuso (PP) and preventing the PSOE from taking advantage of the change in leadership to promote a new cycle in the fight for the hegemony of the left with a view to the European elections being held in June.

And at that meeting the two leading parties of the Madrid progressive space arrive, looking askance at each other and, also attentive, to see what happens with Podemos, a formation that took off precisely with the 2014 European elections and that is now experiencing a national crisis that has left without a regional leader. The 161,032 votes that the purple party obtained in the last regional elections, a historical record for a party that has been left without representation, are now like a treasure: everyone wants them.

“There is an undercurrent that will cause a transfer of the vote in 2027 and self-identification with Más Madrid of progressive people who had not yet voted for us, because as soon as you want to stand up to Ayuso, the progressive vote of those under 50 years old is called Más Madrid or it will be called Más Madrid,” defends a source familiar with the strategy of the party that leads the opposition.

“For this reason, 2024 has to be a year of consolidation for the party, because we have gone from election to election since we were born, in 2019,” continues the same source. “As people already know how we run opposition, in municipal politics we have to notice the difference between Más Madrid being or not in the governments of Getafe, Alcorcón, Parla, Coslada… It is a year to test,” he continues. . “And we also have a minister, who we have never experienced, who is going to give visibility, and show that we know how to manage,” she adds.

Mónica García's party campaigned in the last regional elections with the idea that it represented the common house of the left. This approach, which outraged the PSOE, is now taken up and expanded. The large accumulation of demonstrations that take place in the capital every week has not gone unnoticed in the ranks of the party. For this reason, its leaders have made a public call for mobilization and have launched an agitation and propaganda department with which to reach an audience with whom they had not yet connected their proposals. They are two examples that in the struggle for power nothing is left to chance. Nor in the PSOE of Madrid.

“It's going to be an intense year for Madrid. The European elections are going to be very important,” explains a socialist source who has the confidence of their leader, Juan Lobato. “Although it is true that they are very national in nature, they will serve to measure [liderazgos]”, he adds about the PSOE of Madrid, which won the 2019 elections, did not govern because Ciudadanos preferred to make an agreement with the PP, and since then has been looking for a formula to repeat that electoral success.

“I think the most important thing in the medium term is to build each week in the Assembly with coherence and constant initiative,” this interlocutor bets on Lobato, who seeks his own style against Ayuso, as combative as it is purposeful, mixing the denunciation of the problems of the region with the offer of alternative solutions to those proposed by the PP. “That in the end is what gives you profile and makes you identifiable.”

Even in the PP they assume that García's departure changes everything in the progressive sector. “Lobato has won the lottery,” they ironically, despite the fact that it will be difficult for PSOE and Más Madrid to find the right tone to confront each other without disturbing potential voters and without their struggle clashing with the fact that they share the Government of Spain. To begin with, Lobato is reclaiming the centuries-old history of the socialists, as he did, for example, on Friday, when he brought together officials from all over Madrid to launch the political course.

The PSOE, he said, must be “a dam of good sense and responsibility, and also of firmness in the face of the unreasonable confrontation and the permanent confrontation of the Government of the Community of Madrid against the Government of Spain.” But it is not only on the left that they look askance at what a party without representation is doing. It also happens on the right, where Ayuso's PP, which achieved an absolute majority in 2023 with fewer votes than it had obtained in 2021, is attentive to what Ciudadanos does after not appearing in the general elections in July.

“It would be absurd for them to appear,” a source who has the confidence of Ayuso states, emphatically, despite the fact that the orange party, which obtained 52,000 votes in the last regional elections, has already issued signals that it could attend the elections.

Because in politics everything changes very quickly. And, although in the PP of Madrid everything seems like smiles and it is celebrated every day that Ayuso is free to impose his political agenda, reality also hides his shadows. The current Government was designed for management, taking for granted that Alberto Núñez Feijóo would be in La Moncloa. After the general elections, Pedro Sánchez is still there, which forces the regional Executive to face a heavy digestion while it readjusts to return to its strategy of frontal opposition.

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