The president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, will not meet with Pedro Sánchez at the Moncloa, according to what her cabinet announced this Monday. “The institutional deterioration to which Spain is being subjected cannot be overlooked,” says the team of the regional leader of the PP in a statement, after Sánchez had summoned her for this Friday, October 25. A meeting framed in a round of bilateral meetings with the regional presidents with the focus on regional financing after complaints about the economic agreement for Catalonia and with other issues on the table such as immigration, infrastructure, investments or the territorial debate.
With this decision, the Madrid president ignores the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who advocated in an interview in The World for attending bilateral meetings with the President of the Government. “If a regional president does not go to the Moncloa Palace, I think he makes a mistake,” said the popular leader, who maintained that he attended all the meetings he had as Galician president, who said that he thought Ayuso would attend the meeting.
Feijóo also raised the importance of these meetings to address different regional issues, in the case of Madrid, he highlighted the situation of Cercanías or “immigration”, and insisted that “President Ayuso knows very well that her responsibility is to defend the interests of the people of Madrid and practice state policy, and that is what it has always been doing.”
Sources from the national leadership of the PP have assured elDiario.es that Ayuso warned Feijóo of her intentions yesterday, and that he was “understanding” with the Madrid president. From Genoa they regret that while “the President of the Government does not ask for the resignation of the State Attorney General, accused of persecuting Ayuso”, Sánchez “has called her corrupt, who is not accused of anything.”
“Feijóo maintains everything he said, but is understanding of Isabel’s motivations,” the same sources conclude. That is, Feijóo considers Ayuso’s decision a “mistake.”
Ayuso justifies his refusal by assuring that this meeting “is being held within the framework of a round of meetings following the negotiation of the breakup of the common Treasury of all Spaniards with the Government’s pro-independence partners. A pact that is going to be lethal for the rule of law, the unity of Spain and solidarity between regions.”
“Therefore, this decision cannot be considered valid based on accomplished facts that have never been consulted either with the regional presidents or with the Spanish people in any electoral program. “You cannot normalize what is not normal,” says the Madrid Government in a statement issued this Monday that includes the reasons why Ayuso has declined to attend this appointment. And they add: “Since the last General Elections, a series of destructive decisions have been made whose negative effects will take a long time to reverse.” Taking into account the reasons given by the Madrid Government headquarters, Ayuso has chosen not to cancel its agenda and continue with the event that had been scheduled for weeks on Friday in Porriño, Galicia, with several other institutions.
On the other hand, from the Madrid Executive headquarters they assure that “less than 24 hours before the La Moncloa meeting, the President of the Government defamed the President on an official trip to Brussels, with very serious accusations that were along the same lines as his intervention, the day before, in the Congress of Deputies.”
“The ministers have been ordered to repeat them during the last hours, in an unacceptable and inappropriate campaign of a Government against an inferior administration. This situation had never been experienced either,” they indicate. However, the president’s team insists on ensuring that “the institutional deterioration to which Spain is being subjected cannot be overlooked.”
Sánchez’s statements in the Lower House directly appealed to the corruption of the PP. The president assured that the PP’s corruption ranges from “Ayuso’s a to Zaplana’s zeta.” Following this question, the president replied hours later in the Madrid Assembly that it is not “the a of Ábalos to the zeta of Zapatero”, but the “be of Berni, of Barrabés and of Begoña”. The president’s wife is “another one who is moving forward,” he launched, using the same informal expression that Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, his chief of staff, used to announce the indictment of the State Attorney General a week in advance.
The central government defends that “Ayuso represents the worst policy,” said Óscar López, Minister for Digital Transformation, on TVE minutes after this news became known. Along the same lines, he pointed out that the regional president has turned “the Community of Madrid into the epicenter of mud and corruption” and regrets that it is the “Spanish representative of the ultra wave that invades the entire world.” “That is the worst possible policy. “She is the one who breaks the bridges once again,” he insisted, reports José Enrique Monrosi.
The second vice president of the Government, Yolanda Díaz, has also reacted to this announcement. He has accused the Madrid president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, of violating the Constitution with her decision to be absent from the event scheduled by La Moncloa. “The presidencies of the regional administrations must be accountable to their citizens. There is a constitutional principle of dialogue between administrations. I would like the president to comply with her constitutional mandates. It is evident that he is not doing it,” he said in statements to the media before entering an informative breakfast with the general secretary of CCOO, Unai Sordo, reports Alberto Ortiz.
Sémper: “I would have gone”
The PP spokesperson, Borja Sémper, assured this Monday on Antena 3 that he would have attended the meeting. “We are an institutional party and the paradigm of institutionality is Alberto Núñez Feijóo, a man who respects the norm, the form and who also believes in that institutionality that must be preserved. And that’s what we continue to think.”
But Sémper has said that they understand Ayuso and her decision. “We would be fooled if we thought that the relationship between Isabel Díaz Ayuso and the President of the Government is a conventional relationship and the relationship between the Government of Madrid and the Government of Spain is a conventional relationship,” he assured. “If the Government insults and accuses you of a crime when there is no substance to even venture it and talks about your partner as a confessed criminal. What is this?” he asked. Ayuso’s partner, Alberto González Amador, acknowledged in writing having committed crimes against the Public Treasury.
“48 hours ago, the President of the Government called Díaz Ayuso corrupt. We can understand that this institutional relationship is absolutely broken. And we can also, and this is our opinion, come to the conclusion that this is not the responsibility of the president of the Community of Madrid, but of the president of the Government,” he added. “I would have gone to that meeting to tell the Prime Minister this to his face,” he concluded.
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