The president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, who this Friday will receive the president of Argentina, Javier Milei, at the headquarters of the regional government, will travel to Germany next week to meet with the president of the European Central Bank (ECB), Christine Lagarde and her vice president, Luis de Guindos; as well as with executives from Siemens, DHL and Deutsche Bank. The trip, announced while the legal departments of the PSOE and Más Madrid are analyzing the possibility of appealing the medal with which Milei will be awarded, will coincide with the judicial declaration, on Monday, of the president’s boyfriend, Alberto González Amador, as being investigated by the alleged commission of two crimes of tax fraud (admitted by his lawyer) and one of falsification of a commercial document. The couple lives in a home that has been at the center of controversy for having been renovated without the required permits, according to an inspection by the City Council. Ayuso’s trip will last until Tuesday and will include an approach to the executive of the Bavaria region (Munich), emulating the strategic alliances that Madrid has been weaving with Lisbon (Portugal) or Paris Île-de-France (France).
“The objective is to transfer economic policies free of bureaucratic obstacles [de Madrid] “that facilitate activity and represent a pole of attraction for large projects,” explains the Government of the Community of Madrid in a statement. “[Se busca] continue attracting investment to the region, with meetings in prominent companies from this German country that already operate in the Community,” he adds about a foreign activity that has not yet left great known results, but has offered a great promotional opportunity for the figure of Ayuso. On this occasion, his displacement will provide him with another benefit: being absent while his partner, with whom he lives, goes to testify as being investigated in court.
The intense international agenda of the president of Madrid, which began with a trip to the United States in 2021, reached its climax in February. Then, as this newspaper reported, Ayuso skipped a plenary session of the Assembly called to control his Government to attend the European PP congress in Bucharest (Romania). Trying to avoid controversy, the baroness’ team organized minor institutional meetings to be able to affirm that the displacement was official, and not partisan. But it didn’t matter. Opposition broke out. “The absolute majority has gone to his head,” Juan Lobato, the general secretary of the socialists in the Community of Madrid, even said.
Before and after, Ayuso has traveled halfway around the world, and has turned the Real Casa de Correos, headquarters of the Madrid Government, into a mandatory stop for all politicians with liberal options in America. Thus, the president of Madrid has passed through Miami, Lisbon, Paris, London, Brussels, Venice, Washington, Warsaw, New York, Jerusalem and Marseille. The resulting bill, of tens of thousands of euros, has been increased by the travel of a Telemadrid team to cover its foreign activity in the news programs of the public television channel.
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The most tangible results have been the signing of memoranda with Île-de-France or Lisbon that outline the possibility of collaborating in the request for European funds, as Ayuso herself explained. One more sign that the president of Madrid, always so critical of the foreign action of the Catalan independence movement, is strongly committed to international politics: selling Madrid to attract investment to Madrid.
In parallel, Ayuso has received in Madrid some key political names in the sphere of the liberal world, which the Madrid leader aspires to represent: those who at that time are the mayor of Lima, Jorge Muñoz Wells; the president of Ecuador, Guillermo Lasso, and then his successor, Daniel Noboa; that of Colombia, Iván Duque, or the person in charge of Venezuela, Juan Guaidó. In addition, he has met with dozens of ambassadors in his office in Puerta del Sol: from the United Kingdom to Japan. This frenetic activity, unparalleled among the rest of the regional presidents, has aroused more than just misgivings in the Government of Spain from its very beginning.
Anger at Guaidó
February 2020. Carmen Calvo, then first vice president of the Government of Spain, explodes. “Foreign policy is a matter for the Government of Spain and it is intolerable that the PP wants to use institutions such as the Madrid City Council or the Autonomous Community for that,” she says in an interview published by EL PAÍS, appealing to institutional loyalty. “They are doing foreign policy where it doesn’t belong,” she emphasizes. “And we demand that the institutions be respected.”
What has happened? Among other things, Ayuso has received with all honors Juan Guaidó, president in charge of Venezuela, for whom he extends the red carpet, provides a mass bath in the heart of the capital of Spain, and allows him to organize a meeting with his father in an exclusive villa on the Canal de Isabel II. In contrast, the central government opts for discretion: an appointment at the Casa de América with the Foreign Minister, and without the President of the Government. The sparks that fly consequently are the warning of the fire that is to come. Because that day, Ayuso begins to exploit the multiple possibilities that foreign policy offers him.
This leads us to this Friday, when the reception of Milei, who day in and day out, criticizes and insults the Spanish president, Pedro Sánchez, has led several ministers to accuse Ayuso of “institutional disloyalty.” The event will take place this Friday, after publishing the Official Gazette of the Community of Madrid (BOCM) the decree with the awarding of the International Medal of the Community of Madrid to the president of Argentina. Ayuso has called all Argentines who want to come to the meeting, trying to provoke a mass bath like the one that occurred in 2020 when the Venezuelan Guaidó visited her. When the ceremony is over, the president will start thinking about her next trip: on Monday and Tuesday of next week she will be in Germany, visiting Munich and Frankfurt while her partner testifies in court.
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