Democratic experience shows that the divisions between right and left tend to blur in municipal politics the smaller the localities are. Personal relationships, neighborhood quarrels or the simple distinction between ‘long-time’ countrymen and those with more recent roots end up being important issues. In Manzanares el Real, a municipality in the Madrid mountains, these are precisely the conditions that appear behind the surprising breakup of the left-wing coalition government last June and the resignation, this month, of the mayor, José Luis Labrador, of PSOE-Progresistas . The former councilor threatened with a pact with the PP that did not come to fruition, but for which there are precedents in the eventful local politics.
Being from Manzanares or not depends less on the municipal registry than on being recognized as such by one’s peers, according to some of the oldest residents. Silvia Masiá, a councilor from Más Madrid who made her debut as councilor this term, is remembered on the street. “The important thing is that you are from here,” he has been told more than once while walking through the town hall square, according to what he tells elDiario.es.
But it is the others, the ‘new’ ones, who are the protagonists of the sustained growth of the population. Manzanares had 2,300 residents registered in 1991. Today there are more than 9,300, a result largely of the urban exodus from the capital. At the foot of the emblematic rocky area of La Pedriza, on the edge of the Santillana reservoir and with the attraction of the Los Mendoza castle, the tourist attraction of the place is notorious. And “sold” signs multiply in the windows of real estate agencies.
Sara has a clothing stall at the local Friday market. She is very critical of what happened at the town hall, so she prefers not to give her real name. “They fight in a totally arbitrary way and the people feel ignored. “We haven’t been asked anything,” he protests.
“The mayor is a disaster: from one day to the next he breaks the government and then he takes it and leaves,” says Rafael, walking with the child through the town square after eating. Rafael has only been in Manzanares for four years, although he wanted to move for some time before. He also asks to be quoted under a false name. He does give his name and surname José Segura, 73 years old, about to leave permanently for Torrevieja (Alicante) after two decades in the town. “I don’t agree with any party, they would have to be [los políticos] independent townspeople. Here we all know each other and it would be easier,” he says.
Between “disloyalty” and banal problems
In the Mendoza fortress, the provincial deputies decided in 1983 that Madrid would be a normal autonomous community and not a federal district, but the most notable political event in recent times has been the dismantling of the ‘La Boni’ park, again in the hands of the Duchess of Infantado after a court ruling. However, the event did not herald the breakup of the local government. The mayor and two other councilors from PSOE-Progresistas governed in coalition with the neighborhood candidacy CUV (supported by Podemos and Izquierda Unida), with three councilors, and Más Madrid, with another , compared to six from the PP and one from Vox.
Labrador, however, declared the government broken on June 13, amid accusations of “disloyalty” and mentions of seemingly minor issues, such as an alleged lack of cleanliness in the municipality or disagreements over the salaries of municipal workers. Immediately, his former colleagues urged him to “reconsider,” arguing that the disagreements were not as serious as they were made out to be.
Among those surprised was Fernando Román, from CUV, who had already been councilor of the municipal government in the previous legislature. “We had been governing for five years. We had had a first term in which we faced the pandemic or the [tormenta] Philomena. These are situations that must be managed and that could have caused tension, [pero] “We knew how to resolve the discrepancies that, on the other hand, are totally normal,” he says.
Román admits that the hidden conflict between new and old neighbors can explain certain frictions. “There are some who believe that the town is little less than theirs and [esto] It has a lot to do with people who consider that the most recent population does not have the same status […] After those first four years of understanding [con el PSOE] It seemed that things were normalizing a little in that sense, but it may be that some of that logic still remains,” he concedes.
Winks to the right
In the first municipal plenary session after breaking the coalition, Labrador, a civil guard by profession, gave clues about his government plans. He acknowledged that with three councilors in a corporation of 13 it would be difficult to last three years. “I am left in the hands of all the groups that are capable of looking beyond,” he stated. The PP immediately picked up the gauntlet. “If they invite us […] The moderate right has already governed with the PSOE,” argued veteran popular councilor Damián Guijarro. He spoke with knowledge of the facts: in the 2015-2019 legislature, the socialists ended up incorporating Guijarro’s PP and another local party into the government.
But that pact was not even the first. The PSOE has been surviving in the mayor’s office since 2007, despite always being in a minority, due to the division of the opposition. A succession of right-wing, independent, liberal parties and various splits from the previous ones, many times with the same protagonists, allowed the socialists, between crossed enmities and pacts of convenience, to govern with precarious balances, always with the threat of the motion of shadow censorship. The instability was notorious between 2011 and 2015. The first government agreement was broken after a year and the 2014 budgets were voted with a majority in which there were expelled councilors from two parties.
The first stable government with left-wing parties (PSOE with CUV) was not formed until 2019, with Labrador already at the helm after taking over from the previous mayor, Óscar Cerezal, who had three terms. The socialists were the majority group, with four councilors for the three of their partners. With the 2023 elections and the emergence of Más Madrid with a female councilor, the balance was reversed in favor of the most left-wing leg of the coalition. The councilor’s suspicions began to arise. “In this legislature the arithmetic was a little different, [el PSOE] I no longer had an automatic majority […] That may have been part of the unrest, but it is what the governments of your coalition have: if you have to find understandings with those who think the same as you, all parties have to give in,” Román muses.
Motions of censure and fisticuffs: a stormy democratic past
Laces had already been problematic in the 90s and early 2000s, when motions of censure were repeated and journalistic reports reported accusations of punches in plenary sessions. The figure of Damián Guijarro, a young independent mayor in the 80s and later a seasoned Urban Planning councilor, emerges again here. Over the years he moved to the PP and later to a local formation with a liberal surname, to finally rejoin the popular ranks. Their ability to survive exemplifies the particular local dynamic, where bitter rivals become loyal partners if arithmetic requires it. An example: from being expelled from a plenary session for loudly arguing with the mayor (through police intervention), he eventually joined the mayor’s government team.
The turbulent historical experience could have given Labrador hope to reformulate the Government with the right. His version is that, if it was not achieved, it was by orders from above, as he wrote in his resignation letter on October 14, in which he also cited health reasons. “After a period of dialogue with the Popular Party, with whom a large part of our political projects for Manzanares El Real coincided, it has finally not been able to materialize.” [el pacto] due to lack of agreement from the two big parties in Madrid, PP and PSOE,” he lamented. This Wednesday, in his last intervention in the plenary session, he emphasized: “I opened the door for broader understandings, leaving aside political brands, ideologies, electoral calculations and populism.”
On the same day of the resignation, the Secretary of Organization of the PSOE of Madrid, Marta Bernardo, indicated that the party was working to regain the coalition. The resigning mayor’s second in the local government, Alicia Gallego, quickly ran to succeed him. If a week before his resignation he accused CUV of “demagogy” on Facebook—the PP compiled his statements disqualifying his former coalition partners—the following week he released a statement from his party that called for harmony. The parties have already met to iron out differences.
The deadline expires on November 7, the date set by law to hold the session in which the new mayor will be elected. If there is no agreement, the baton will fall to the PP, whose list received the most votes in the elections. CUV does not rule out running for mayor. “All scenarios are open, we will have to see the agreement we reach,” explains Román. Organic sources from Más Madrid say that they will close the door to the PP, but they ask for guarantees: “If not, what assures us that in six months the PSOE will not break the government again?”
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