December 22th. Christmas Lottery Day. Day to announce that the Madrid City Council will not give the Medal of Honor to Israel – as it had promised, but which the Villa's chroniclers did not recommend – and, therefore, it has announced that the insignia will be given to the Jewish community. Day, also, of two plenary sessions at the Madrid City Council. One to approve the 2024 Budgets – the first of José Luis Martínez-Almeida's PP with an absolute majority – and another, the monthly one, on municipal issues. The mayor of Madrid has appeared at his own request to take stock of these first six months at the head of a more comfortable mandate for the PP, now without Ciudadanos on his arm and, above all, without the whispers of Vox. So much so, that Almeida has criticized Javier Ortega Smith with a fierceness rarely seen in the Cibeles palace:
―I'm glad he doesn't govern in Madrid.
So much so, that this Friday of lotteries and plenary sessions, many cards have been printed by the opposition. Rita Maestre, from Más Madrid, has shown an old interview with the mayor, where she confessed: “I have tried joints and I have had sporadic sex, I am not such a strange creature.” Or: “I could fall in love with a left-wing woman: but red, red, no, let's leave her 'pink'.” Almeida, during this display of headlines, has chosen to get up and talk to one of his councilors. The last plenary session of the year has once again been a classic: a lot of noise, many attacks and many memories of the Madrid citizen most named in the municipal political debates: Pedro Sánchez.
“We can affirm that Madrid,” Almeida observed, “is experiencing the best moment in its history. A good example of this is the approval of the budgets, because they are the budgets that this city needs.” In general terms, the 2024 accounts of the capital of Spain amount to 5,940.23 million euros, 7.2% more than those of 2022, the current ones, which closed with a deficit of 357 million, the first red numbers of the capital in 12 years. The main projects, for the first half of 2024, will be the beginning of the undergrounding of the A5 and the covering of the Ventas bridge. The burying of the A5 was a promise made by Almeida in 2019, which was not carried out in the last term.
Almeida set a horizon focused on housing policies for this new mandate. “In these six months alone we have approved 20,000 additional homes,” he said. “We are going to take out 15 free housing plots so that Madrid residents will have rental homes for 15 years.” However, there is no trace of the promise of the regulations on the regulation of tourist apartments, which he promised last October.
What affects the most is what happens closest. So you don't miss anything, subscribe.
Subscribe
“The PP likes fruit,” said Más Madrid spokesperson, Rita Maestre, to summarize these first six months of absolute popular majority. “Calling the President of the Government a son of a bitch, that's what's behind every laugh. That, and cheering the Nazis on Ferraz Street, that one, and cheering the most genocidal Government, which is Israel. “Six months have passed and there is nothing.” And she has cited a latest survey on the state of housing in the capital: eight of the 21 districts of Madrid already exceed 1,000 euros per rent.
The Vox spokesperson, Ortega Smith, began his intervention with a question: “Mr. Mayor, what do you want us to talk about?” And he has remembered what Almeida promised in the 2019 electoral campaign and then did not deliver. Almeida looked at Smith with some resignation. Smith returned the look with a phrase:
—Don't cry, mayor.
The PSOE spokesperson, Reyes Maroto, recalled that in the Madrid plenary session, supposedly, they have to talk about Madrid. “We are in Madrid,” she said. And she has criticized the problems that neighbors have with the cleaning cantons, highly criticized by neighbors. In the middle of this intervention, the third prize of the lottery fell, which Maroto recalled at the end of her intervention:
—Today is lottery day. Merry christmas!
Subscribe here to our daily newsletter about Madrid.
#Almeida #attacks #Vox #plenary #session #year #announces #medal #honor #Israel #Jewish #community