“Welcome to Madrid. You will feel at home and I am sure you will love it.” “I have noticed the affection of the Madrid PP from minute one.” This is how the Minister for Digital Transformation, Óscar López, and Senator Alfonso Serrano, ‘number two’ of Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s PP, greeted each other this Tuesday. Both have avoided trompe l’oeil and have approached the Government control session in the Senate as what it was: López’s first public act as a candidate to unseat Ayuso from the Community of Madrid, primaries through. Both on the attack, with López marking what will be the axis of his opposition from the Council of Ministers to the Madrid president.
“Don’t worry about us, worry about your fellow party members. If not, ask [Juan] Lobato”, Serrano started his question to the minister. Without consideration or detours, as is usual in Ayuso’s organic right hand, the senator has tried to implicate López in the alleged leak of the email in which the lawyers of Ayuso’s partner confirmed the tax crimes that their client was willing to commit. to assume to avoid the criminal process implied by the level of fraud detected by the Tax Agency.
Lobato was the leader of the PSOE in Madrid until last week, when he resigned after the WhatsApp messages between him and López’s former chief of staff, Pilar Sánchez Acera, appeared published in the press after he himself submitted them to a notary. These messages, according to Ayuso and her entourage, would confirm that it was the Government that leaked the information that confirms her partner’s tax fraud.
López was then chief of staff of the president, Pedro Sánchez, who promoted him to minister at the return of the summer. It was already decided that López would replace Lobato to face Ayuso in the elections scheduled for 2027 and which has been confirmed at the end of November. Days later, Lobato and Sánchez Acera’s WhatsApp messages were leaked to ‘Abc’.
Serrano has focused on Sánchez Acera from the beginning of his intervention. “Are you going to tell me that that person you trust the most did not notify you that he had the email of an individual that the State Attorney General had just obtained in his Gmail and that it had not been published?” he asked. “Did that person you absolutely trust not warn you that he was going to pass it on to a colleague from the Madrid Assembly to use it?” he continued. “Do they really want us to believe that Sánchez Aceras functioned as a lone wolf in Moncloa?” he asked.
The general secretary of Ayuso’s PP has closed his first intervention without avoiding naming the elephant in the room: “Look, if you want to start your Madrid adventure after having failed in Castilla y León on the right foot, I invite you to be brave and tell us “Did you cooperate in any way in the crime of revealing secrets for which the State Attorney General is accused?”
“Ayuso’s chief of staff does nothing without telling him”
If Serrano has made good the maxim that the best defense is a good attack, López has not avoided the fray either and has made it clear that he is quite clear in what field he will have to play in the coming years.
“You have had a little bad luck because you were so happy with this question and it turns out that today the Supreme Court has summoned Miguel Ángel Rodríguez [director de Gabinete de Ayuso] to answer for the leak,” said López, who recalled that in his adventure as a PSOE candidate in Castilla y León he obtained 30% of the vote, compared to 22% for Ayuso in 2019, when he became president of Madrid after lose the elections.
López has ignored that Rodríguez, along with eight journalists, have been called to appear as witnesses in the case that investigates whether there was a leak from the State Attorney General’s Office of information that, according to Rodríguez himself, he himself sent to ‘El Mundo’, the media that first reported (erroneously) on the negotiations between Alberto González Amador’s lawyers and the Prosecutor’s Office.
For this reason, López has denied being the leaker of anything. “Mr. Serrano, I am going to answer you. The answer is: ‘no’. “Perhaps you know much more than I do about that leak.”
Serrano has accused the minister of being a coward in his reply and has expressly identified him as a leaker: “Be brave. You had passed that document to him. You know it, I know it, this House knows it and all of Spain knows it. And do you know why? Because no one is going to believe that an advisor to the President of the Government’s Cabinet receives a document from the State Attorney General that she cannot have and gives it to a colleague in Madrid without you knowing.”
The senator has raised the accusation to the President of the Government and the Minister of the Presidency and Justice, Félix Bolaños: “Who is more afraid of the content of the Attorney General’s cell phone, you or Mr. Bolaños? “It is between the two.” Serrano has challenged López: “We do one thing. You and I are going to Mr. Lobato’s notary. I show him my WhatsApp messages with Ayuso’s boyfriend and his Chief of Staff; and you yours, with your advisor and with the president of the Government.”
Ayuso’s number two then said a phrase that can grow in the newspaper archive and with the passage of time. “He’s not going to do it, he’s not going to do it,” he elaborated on the idea of going to a notary to empty their respective cell phones. “He is not going to do it because he is going to use arguments to tell us that a crime was committed and that his Chief of Staff leaked a lie,” he stated. “There is no evidence of the second and it is being investigated,” he added, assuming that Ayuso’s partner committed at least one crime. And Serrano blurted out: “But I’m going to tell you one thing: Ayuso’s chief of staff does nothing without telling you. The normal. Like you did with your president. Tell him everything.”
Serrano has concluded with a new accusation of lack of courage against the minister, whom he has pointed out for trying to “save himself” and for “a woman who is inferior to take the piss.” “Letting a woman who is beneath you eat this brown is neither feminist, nor brave, nor very Madrid. “It’s cowardly,” he concluded.
López: “In a time of hoaxes, let’s get to the facts”
“It is cowardly to accuse without evidence,” the minister began his last response. “What you have stated here today is false and I ask you to apologize when it is proven,” he added.
The minister has raised the tone and recalled that Serrano was caught meeting in a cafeteria with Alberto González Amador when the scandal of his tax fraud and the double apartment that the couple uses had already broken out without having explained how they paid for it. “Cocacolas with Ayuso’s boyfriend. I suppose that with the Chief of Staff it will be whiskey,” he told him about Miguel Ángel Rodríguez. “Be careful with the mix,” he said ironically.
“In a time of hoaxes, let’s go to the facts,” said López, who recalled that last March it was published that Ayuso’s partner had defrauded the Treasury, as well as the threatening messages that his Chief of Staff launched against journalists. from elDiario.es, the media that gave the exclusive. “That is why the Supreme Court has cited him, to clarify where the origin of the hoax that that man, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, spread is,” he explained.
“Mr. Serrano. Bullying with me, no,” continued López, who assured that “all this has a reason.” “You want to hide all the shenanigans of Mrs. Ayuso’s father, brother, and boyfriend. That’s the truth. You want to hide what happened in the Madrid residences during Covid. “You want to hide that you have said that you are the only community in Spain that has not signed an agreement of 140 million euros for public universities, because you are privatizing the universities.”
“That is what is happening,” added López, who closed his speech by making it clear that he has assumed who he is going to risk his political future against. Against “all the noise, all the mess, all the mud machine of Mr. Miguel Ángel Rodríguez.” “And you’re just his everything guy. Thanks a lot”.
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