The spokesperson for Más Madrid in the Assembly, Manuela Bergerot (Argentina, June 13, 1976), arrived in Spain as a baby and after the forced exile of her father, detained in Argentina by the Videla dictatorship. She grew up in Torrelodones (Madrid). Now, when she seeks to consolidate Más Madrid as the main alternative to the PP of Isabel Díaz Ayuso, she remembers that her concern for politics was born there: “The first awareness that I have since I was very little is the inequality that not having the situation generates. regulated administrative, being without papers.”
Ask. What was it like growing up without papers?
Answer. I did not have Spanish nationality until I was 15 years old. This inequality generates an awareness of discrimination against basic rights, access to healthcare, to education. At a time when the country was still transitioning from dictatorship to democracy, men in blue shirts entered my mother’s Argentine restaurant in En Torrelodones and forced everyone there to raise their arms and sing the Face to sun. We lived with that and that normalization was what caused, for example, my school and high school classmates to be the murderers of Lucrecia Pérez. The same neo-Nazi classmates in my class, a few weeks later, threatened me and told me: “You are next, Sudaca.” And if they did it once, why couldn’t they do it again?
Q. What is done about that?
R. That is not a particular question of mine, but of all of us who grew up in those towns in the Northwestern Sierra, who know what it was like to grow up facing neo-Nazi organizations that roamed freely. Faced with that, and anyone who has grown up in the Sierra Noroeste of Madrid knows this, there is a very long tradition of organizations in defense of democracy, and many of us also become politicized through the defense of natural heritage. There comes Vecinos por Torrelodones, neighbors who organized to defend that the Madrid PP could not throw balls. I was a teenager who was around that.
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Q. The president of the PP of Madrid and the region, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, maintains that “the Sánchez Government follows the path of the Venezuelan dictatorship”, or that “Sánchez leads us to the dictatorship.” With his family background, how does that sound to you?
R. She is irresponsible. An irresponsible person who, since she has no political project for Madrid, is dedicated to sowing the ground of a perverse story, in order to cover up negligent management. What worries me most about that speech is not that she is covering up the fact that she does not have a project and that the only thing she is interested in is governing the national Popular Party. The most serious thing about that is that she is sowing, she is fertilizing, a field where monsters like Alvise grow.
• Control the media and the Judiciary.
• Use institutions against the political alternative.
• Rewrite History.
• Fill the institutions with political commissioners.
• Rewrite the Penal Code.All this has a name:
Sánchez takes us to the dictatorship. pic.twitter.com/i3pQW5Izk5
— Isabel Díaz Ayuso (@IdiazAyuso) June 16, 2024
Q. Are you referring, for example, to receiving and honoring the president of Argentina, Javier Milei?
R. Decorating Milei in the midst of a diplomatic crisis between Spain and Argentina is disloyal to our people and our democratic institutions. It must be remembered that the crisis comes precisely from the insults of the Argentine president in a previous visit, promoted by Vox. I suppose that the medal seeks to compete with Santiago Abascal and set its own pace against Feijóo. Ayuso wants to be the reference for the reactionary international in Spain. That is why she now wants to do what she criticized so much about the Catalan independentists: her own foreign policy as president of an autonomous community.
Q. He says that this is how the soil is sown for phenomena like Alvise. What does Ayuso have to do with that?
R. That the Popular Party of Madrid led by Ayuso is the worst Popular Party in Spain since it is the one that is dismantling all public services, everything that unites us as a society, and that precisely with the addition of how it has sown a field full of lies. She is a president who lies at a press conference in a Government Council [en referencia a cuando defendió a su pareja Alberto González Amador, investigado por la presunta comisión de dos delitos de fraude fiscal y uno de falsedad en documento mercantil]who uses his Government to defame, to attack his political adversary, and who threatens journalists [en referencia al jefe de gabinete de la presidenta, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez]. Ayuso has kidnapped the Madrid institutions from the moment in which the Assembly cannot talk about anything that bothers her. Politics is not fulfilling its essence, which is to improve the lives of Madrid residents. And it is in that crop field where monsters like Alvise grow, fed by Ayuso.
Q. What do you mean when you say that Parliament is hijacked?
R. That value judgments are made about the content of the opposition’s initiatives. They privatize public services, in this case Madrid’s healthcare, and then they reject all the initiatives regarding the Quirón Group because they say that the Assembly is not there to supervise private companies. There the circle of perversion closes. If I cannot call the Quirón Group to appear, who is going to answer to me how Madrid’s public health system is being managed, if they are precisely doing it? That is a full-fledged kidnapping. They have also vetoed the experts of the Citizen Commission for the Truth in nursing homes, who are epidemiologists, professors…
Q. The Assembly works like this because the PP has an absolute majority. What has the left done wrong?
R. I think, precisely, buy that story. That speech underpins that, and also makes invisible that there have been other milestones in which this has not always been the case. In 2015 we won the Madrid City Council [con Ahora Madrid y Manuela Carmena], there have been several occasions in the Madrid Assembly in which the government’s dispute has been for one deputy above, one deputy below, and we know that this can be turned around again. Our recipe is working, and I am increasingly convinced that in 2027 we are going to turn around the government of the Community of Madrid.
Q. And what has Ayuso done well?
R. What it has done well has been a model of a disjointed, isolated society, and increasingly degrading the public, which is one of the things that guarantees having a cohesive and fair society. Let us remember that we live in one of the richest autonomous communities and at the same time the most territorially unequal. That degrades and in the end monsters like Alvise emerge. But we also have other models in sight. It was possible in the past [gobiernos de la izquierda]has been possible in other communities and will be possible again.
Q. One of his deputies, Pablo Padilla, has an open file in the Assembly for simulating that he was shooting during a plenary session. Why hasn’t he requested the record?
R. Well, because I support Pablo Padilla, the leadership of the parliamentary group supports him, and the entire parliamentary group supports him. We have it very clear. It is an accusation that has no evidence. The Popular Party is going to do everything possible to continue punishing Más Madrid because it knows that we are the force that is eroding it and controlling it. I wish they would tear their clothes both because of the genocide that we are seeing against the Palestinian people, and because of a gesture absolutely taken out of context.
Q. Doesn’t that gesture even deserve an apology?
R. I insist. He ayuso, that day, not only did he not talk about Madrid, as he always does, but he also said truly atrocious things [sobre Israel y Palestina]. He seeks to generate any controversy and punish the opposition leaders, to degrade our action, but he is not going to achieve it, because he knows that he has no basis for it.
🇪🇸 | Pablo Padilla, deputy of Mas Madrid and sympathizer of the terrorist group Hamas, simulates firing a gun during an intervention by Ayuso. pic.twitter.com/iTWIHGOZV0
— (@The_Libertax) May 23, 2024
Q. The PSOE maintains that Más Madrid has lost its window of opportunity, and that the electoral fight in the region is already between Ayuso and its leader, Juan Lobato. Has Mónica García’s departure from the Government of Spain and Sumar’s poor result in the European Championships done so much damage?
R. We haven’t hit the ceiling. What’s more, in just five years as an organization we governed eight of the most important cities in Madrid. [Getafe, Rivas, Alcorcón, Coslada, Casarrubuelos, Parla y Velilla de San Antonio]; we have provided the best Minister of Health; and the progressive bloc has assumed our flags as their own.
Q. What has gone wrong in Sumar?
R. Organizations with territorial strength have to set the pace from now on. It is true that there were not good results in the European Championships for Sumar, but he is already reflecting and redirecting himself. We are the forces with territorial roots that demonstrate that we do not stop growing. We have the recipe. In Madrid it works. We hope that from now on they will copy us.
Q. Didn’t you listen to them in the European campaign?
R. Más Madrid did not participate in the direction of the European campaign and, therefore, we did not have a space there where we could contribute precisely what has worked for us. Even so, we are very proud of the campaign we have done in Madrid. It has been shown that when we do not present ourselves with our identity, with our candidate and with our roadmap, things have not worked as well as they could have worked.
Q. If the autonomous organizations are the powerful ones, what is the point of being in Sumar?
R. Más Madrid is not within any organization. Más Madrid is autonomous, and is another of the actors that make up the electoral coalition with which we presented ourselves on July 23 and also for the European elections. We are one more actor, just as the Sumar movement is one more actor in that coalition.
Q. More Madrid present themselves as a Madrid autonomist party. What do you think that the Government has committed to recognizing the “singularity” of Catalonia within the global financing reform?
R. The unique financing that interests me is that which reaches each and every one of the people of Madrid in the form of public services.
Q. Does it seem good or bad to you?
R. I have to see that proposal specifically, because I haven’t seen it yet.
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