The president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, hinted this Thursday that it is inevitable to sanction the Vox spokesperson, Rocío Monasterio, for having voted on behalf of an absent deputy during last week's plenary session, according to the video and session logs. Although the leader of the PP represents the executive branch, her party controls the legislative branch thanks to its absolute majority, so this Friday, when the Regional Assembly Table meets, it is foreseeable that an investigation will begin that is “very guaranteeing and that “It should last several weeks,” according to a parliamentary source who has the confidence of the president of the institution, Enrique Ossorio. Rarely has it been more true that revenge is a dish best served cold. Free from the chains of Vox, a party on which she depended for two terms, Díaz Ayuso is ready to collect all her outstanding accounts with Monasterio. The spokesperson for the extreme right risks a financial fine and a suspension as a deputy of between 15 and 30 days.
“Your life is to criticize the PP, no matter what happens,” the regional president told the opposition spokesperson during the control session of her Government. “I see them a little unfocused. She has had a very unfortunate week (…) Every time she is told how she is making a mistake and where, she comes with the victimist discourse,” she has complained. “They make huge mistakes where we are not going to be able to help them,” she stressed.
“If you are going on a road where you have to drive at 80 [kilómetros por hora], and they catch you at 140, Mrs. Monasterio, you will understand that you will have to be fined. What has not been seen in life is that I vote for another deputy who is absent,” he denounced, without specifying whether the punishment will be a fine or a suspension of between 15 or 30 days, options that parliamentary sources are considering. And she has ironized: “How can it be that with their seats and ours we can reform the statute of autonomy? Even if you ran through all the seats again, voting, voting, voting, we wouldn't be able to.”
These are the keys to a controversy unleashed since Monday, but which has its roots long before, in multiple disagreements since Ayuso came to power for the first time in 2019. Because due to the clash between Ciudadanos and Vox, the PP saw its streak of consecutive decades of lowering taxes broken. And due to the clash between PP and Vox, Ayuso was left without approving the Budget in 2023. And due to the clash between the two parties, there were one and a thousand conflicts in the chamber, with, for example, threats from the extreme right to support the investigation of the deaths in nursing homes during the pandemic (which he ultimately did not support), or his affirmative vote to audit Avalmadrid's accounts to clarify whether a company owned by the president's father had received favored treatment in the granting of a guarantee and the subsequent execution of the guarantees (it was concluded, with great controversy, that he had received it).
What now causes Monasterio's foreseeable sanction is a string of events that culminates with his double vote last Thursday. This is how it happens:
January 25. José Luis Ruiz Bartolomé, Monasterio's right-hand man in the chamber, leaves his seat to return to private activity. Vox has one week to replace him before the first plenary session of the new session. It is not that it is urgent either: the PP has an absolute majority and its presence will not change anything.
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January 31. One day before the plenary session, Pablo Gutiérrez de Cabiedes resigns from occupying the seat, which corresponds to him because he is next on the electoral list. His decision exacerbates the crisis of a party shaken from controversy to controversy in recent months. And so, Vox arrives at the plenary session the next day without its new deputy, Javier Pérez, having taken office and, therefore, with one less vote and an empty chair.
February 1st. At the end of the plenary session, the president of the Assembly, Enrique Ossorio (PP), takes the floor to give a warning before voting begins. “Before starting to vote, I clarify that a deputy, by mistake, has pressed the presence button in two different seats,” says the former regional vice president, who downplays that action. The controversy, in fact, explodes later, when the technical services of the Chamber detect that a vote has been taken from the seat of Ruiz Bartolomé, who is no longer a deputy and has not been replaced by Vox. That is, someone has voted twice.
January 5. Ossorio decides to open an investigation and all eyes immediately turn to Monasterio. Because Henríquez de Luna admits in the meeting of spokespersons that he activated two different places as present. He did not want the seat next to Monastery's to be empty, which would be unsightly for the cameras, but he finally returned to his seat. The leader is the one who comes to admit having voted several times, although she does not say it clearly either.
“It's technology stuff,” he laughs during a press conference in which he describes himself pressing and unpressing buttons in a hurry to try to turn off the seat. But no one takes the matter as a joke in Parliament. And much less the PP, which sees an ideal opportunity to settle outstanding accounts with her former partner, or in the left-wing opposition, in which Más Madrid registers a letter requesting that she be suspended as a deputy for 30 days.
This has never happened in the Madrid Assembly, according to a spokesperson for the institution. But there are precedents outside the region. For example, in the Basque Country. There, in 2003, Parliament sanctioned Carlos Iturgaiz with one month without being able to exercise his rights for having activated the electronic presence indicator in the Chamber of his colleague Jaime Mayor Oreja.
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