The political tension that has long presided over the debates in Congress and the Senate between the Government of Pedro Sánchez, its partners and the right and extreme right, as is also the case in those of the Madrid Assembly between Isabel Díaz Ayuso and the left-wing groups, It has also permeated the municipal debate of the Madrid City Council. Since José Luis Martínez-Almeida achieved an absolute majority in the May 2023 elections, political fights have been our daily bread in the mayor’s control sessions during the Plenary Sessions that are held monthly in Cibeles. The Madrid councilor has ended the year facing the three opposition groups like never before, including Vox, with whose spokesperson, Javier Ortega Smith, he maintains continuous fights.
The tension has reached such a point that King Felipe VI himself demanded in his traditional Christmas message “serenity” in the public debate to reduce “the background noise that prevents citizens from hearing.” The head of state, after considering the “political conflict” as “legitimate,” warned that “sometimes” it is “thunderous,” which can prevent “hearing an even more clamorous demand: a demand for serenity.”
In Cibeles that “thunderous noise” has been heard too many times given that Almeida, like the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, has decided to use as a political battering ram the cases of alleged corruption that plague Pedro Sánchez and his Government, especially the one that affects his wife, Begoña Pérez, and his former Minister of Transportation, José Luis Ábalos. Nor has he missed the case of Íñigo Errejón, who was forced to resign as spokesman for Sumar and left his seat in Congress after being accused of alleged sexual abuse.
Almeida has used these two cases recurrently to corner both the PSOE spokesperson, Reyes Maroto, whom he implicates in the plot of the Koldo case, advisor to former minister Ábalos, and in the shady business of the commission agent Víctor de Aldama, as well as the leader from Más Madrid, Rita Maestre, against whom he has systematically charged mercilessly for her former relationship with Errejón.
This matter clouded the plenary session last November. Almeida, who was already making harsh statements against Maestre and the entire feminist movement for this reason, then accused the Más Madrid spokesperson of “victimizing” herself after the case of her colleague and former partner, to whom the councilor insisted on accusing her of having “covert”, thereby “disparaging” the women victims of his alleged sexual assaults. Maestre – and also Maroto – had previously called him “sexist” and “retrograde” for his comments against the feminist group and had invited him to “resign.” Those days, Almeida was upset because he had received criticism, among them from both left-wing spokespersons, for confessing in El Hormiguero that the “most romantic detail” he had had with Teresa, his wife, had been “taking the clothes off the clothesline.” ”. Hurt by the mockery, Almeida attacked the Más Madrid spokesperson. “How long were you covering up for Íñigo Errejón? Because you have a sexist clothesline detector, but the radar is completely out of order to detect Errejón,” he said. “Women have much more peace of mind with men who remove clotheslines than with women who cover up for Íñigo Errejón,” he concluded, later asking her: “Go away, Mrs. Maestre, get out of politics once and for all.” From that unpleasant encounter, according to her group mates, Maestre came out very affected.
He has not been very benevolent with Maroto either and the clashes between the two have also been notorious. At the end of October, the mayor interrupted the plenary session to denounce that the PSOE spokesperson had called him “clown face”, while demanding that he apologize, which is why the session had to be paralyzed for several minutes. “It’s okay now. I cannot tolerate Mrs. Maroto saying ‘the mayor’s clown face’. That’s it, we’ve come this far. Mrs. Maroto: they are not forms,” he lamented. Almeida had previously told her that she, her party and Pedro Sánchez were a “quagmire of corruption,” comparing the Government to series like The Sopranosor movies like Torrent either The thieves go to the office.
The president of the plenary session, Borja Fanjul, asked for “calm” but sided with the mayor. “Aren’t you going to apologize?” he asked Maroto. “Well, then don’t ask me to speak when you feel offended by some accusation from the Government team, because I’m not going to give it to you,” concluded Fanjul, whose role as referee of the plenary sessions is being highly questioned by the groups of the opposition.
The offensive against the socialist has not ceased in recent weeks. At the end of this same month of December, Almeida demanded that Maroto leave his role as councilor of the Madrid City Council after The Confidential reveal some WhatsApp messages that she crossed with Víctor de Aldama, the businessman involved in the Koldo case, which were sent on August 5, 2020, when she was in charge of the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Tourism of Spain and after the first big wave of coronavirus. The explanations of the socialist who clarified that these messages were framed in a Tourism project in which the Government and the Community of Madrid were going to participate, and that was not finally carried out, were of no use.
As Maroto ignored Almeida’s demand, in the last municipal plenary session the PP brought an urgent motion to disapprove it. During the tense debate, her partner Rita Maestre defended her and challenged the mayor: “If you have any more evidence, put it on the table or stop slandering.” “Mrs. Maroto has not done anything wrong,” stated the Más Madrid spokesperson, later harshly attacking the PP for its countless cases of corruption in which, as she recalled, several of the ministers of the governments of Madrid have been involved. Aznar or leaders of the Community of Madrid, “who in total have accumulated more than 100 years in prison.” “Apologize for the money that your party has stolen from the people of Madrid for more than 20 years and then you could start to give a little morality and decency,” he concluded, which led to a loud applause from the bench of the left. The initiative had votes in favor of Vox, despite the fact that in his speech Javier Ortega Smith was very critical of the mayor, reminding him that he could also be failed for “lying” and not fulfilling his promise to repeal Madrid Central .
Vox also ends up facing Almeida
And because it ended badly, the Madrid councilor has also ended up facing his former ally from the extreme right, with whom he began his first term declaring him his “preferred ally”, in front of the councilors of the Mixed Group, turncoats from Más Madrid and converted in Recover Madrid, which helped him get out of more than one trouble.
One of the main issues over which both have clashed has been the maintenance of the Madrid Central Low Emissions Zone, which the councilor promised to repeal in the electoral campaign. Vox appealed the regulations and in the end the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid issued a ruling that annulled the prohibitions, news that Ortega Smith celebrated with joy, demanding that the mayor not appeal it and return the money for the fines to the people of Madrid. He even walked through the center of Madrid in a vehicle chanting, loudspeaker in hand: “Almeida trilero, return the money now.”
The spokesperson for the extreme right had been very angry with Almeida for some time for having allowed the PP to support at the beginning of the year his disapproval – the second he had suffered – presented by left-wing groups after his attack on the councilor of Más Madrid, Eduardo Fernández Rubiño, at whom he threw a bottle of water and rebuked him as he passed by his seat in another of the agitated debates in Cibeles. The mayor and Vox spokesperson ended up exchanging accusations of “playing into the hands of the left.”
The only gesture that Almeida has had with the Vox councilors, who this year have voted ‘no’ to the 2025 budgets, has been to defend them when last April Rita Maestre called them “Nazis”, which caused a great uproar . Then the councilor stood up and reproached her: “Mrs. Maestre has repeatedly called the Vox councilors Nazis and I would ask her to please rectify because it is a serious accusation. I think that one thing is the debate and another thing is that you call a municipal group Nazis, because I think it is okay to insult,” Almeida argued. Maestre began to justify her disqualification against Vox, but President Fanjul did not let her continue and called her to order three times, finally expelling her from the plenary session. Maestre left but with his entire group behind him, amid angry protests.
On the eve of these festivities, despite sometimes being the architect of the brawls, the Madrid councilor joined the king’s message in which the monarch appealed to reduce the “tension.” At the press conference of the last Government Board of the year, Almeida described the speech as “impeccable.” “It is very important to learn this lesson and follow the path that the king has set for us,” he stressed, after the dialectical clash that he had just had again with the socialist spokesperson in that last Plenary Session, where he spoke that for “heavy policies” the from the left.
“That expression,” he said, “may seem better to some and worse to others, but it falls within what political debate is.” “It can be perfectly understood that Mrs. Maroto’s policies are not those that I share and that they seem repetitive to me. I suppose that no one can understand this as confrontation or tension,” he defended himself. “I did not insult her or disqualify her, nor, of course, did I refuse to debate with Mrs. Maroto, nor did I tell her that I am going to build a wall against her,” he continued. “With me, don’t count on building any wall or so that we Spaniards who think differently cannot talk to each other,” he added, as if all the expletives he has launched throughout these months against the opposition spokespersons – and in many occasions returned by these – would not have existed.
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