Opinion

And Madrid voted for freedom

photo_camera Isabel Díaz Ayuso

The election campaigns taking place in various parts of the world are being watched closely and with special interest because they are taking place not only in extraordinary conditions, in the midst of a pandemic, but also because their results speak volumes about the mood of the electorate afflicted - from different angles - by the consequences of the health emergency, which has led to another economic schism. 

People are going to the polls to vote with anger, bitterness, irritation, punishing what they believe has been unfair or a mismanagement of the current unusual scenario. 

This primarily affects the centrist positions, which will be blurred in the midst of the uproar of mixed feelings because there are many people affected by the current pandemic.

In the Spanish capital, elections for the presidency of the Community of Madrid were held on May 4, because the Moncloa had pinned its hopes on positioning the PSOE in the heart of Madrid, expecting that this would serve to call an early general election in order to be better placed in terms of number of seats in Congress and perhaps shake off the uncomfortable coalition government that the president, Pedro Sánchez, of the PSOE, has had to join with the ultra-left of Unidas Podemos. 

The defeat has been more than clear not only for the PSOE, but also for the so-called left-wing bloc, made up of parties located in different spectrums from the most moderate to the most radical left, such as Unidas Podemos.

It has been an election rarefied by a campaign atmosphere of strong confrontations, with threats in the form of missives with military bullets and even with an apparently bloody knife... letters all sent to various politicians from different parties and some even candidates. 

These were elections in which the people of Madrid went out to vote to work in freedom, to recover their business, to fight hard to obtain a better salary; to decide in freedom and not be subject to a subsidy cheque that binds them to hunger, impoverishment and conformism.

People from Madrid are very often people who were either born in another Spanish province or come from another European, African, Asian or Latin American country. Saying "the vote coming from a Madrid resident" is as much as saying "the vote coming from a New Yorker" because of the cosmopolitan vision. 

Madrid, which is always an open and welcoming city, has vindicated the government of Isabel Díaz Ayuso of the Partido Popular (PP) by giving it a greater degree of confidence; her party has gone from having 30 seats (2019 elections) to more than doubling them with 65.

A view on the matter

There is an interesting reading of the election result: firstly, Ciudadanos party disappears as fails to win a single seat. In the end, voters got tired of a party that one of its mentors, Albert Rivera, once praised, but he himself did not know how to defend a clear project either for Catalonia or for the Spanish government, refusing to form a coalition with Sánchez that would have prevented the Podemos party from coming to power.

People were annoyed not to find in Ciudadanos a centrist, moderate party that included a certain stratum of the 'millennial' population that did not empathise with the traditional bipartisanship and also with certain mature voters dissatisfied with the way politics has been conducted in recent years; mistakes in politics are very costly and Ciudadanos is practically a corpse with zero seats, when it had 26. 

Another victim of these elections is Pablo Iglesias, the ultra-leftist who came out of the Complutense University, from the classroom grid, with the dream under his arm of storming the skies of power; his 'boom' with Podemos and the circumstances of the moment, led him to become vice-president of the Spanish government, a post he abandoned to run for the presidency of the Community of Madrid.

Well, his ten seats obtained (three more than in 2019) have been more than enough for him to take the step that many anticipated: to leave all political posts and leave politics for good. The same as Rivera did two years ago. 

Meanwhile, the PSOE of President Sánchez, has had a clear setback with its 24 seats (in 2019 it had 37). I also find it interesting that the far-right VOX did not make a spectacular leap, it only won one more seat: it went from 12 to 13, I think that fascism has not quite taken hold in the capital of Spain, which has opted for one of the pillars of the traditional bipartisanship, as if people now need what is already known and not the bad to be known. Well played, the PP can govern alone, without the seats of Vox, we will see how Díaz Ayuso juggles these days...