In the eye of the hurricane over the failed acquisition of a luxury penthouse through a regional public company of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso starred this Monday in a new attempt to regain control of the agenda. She did so in the vineyards of the Las Moradas de San Martín winery, in San Martín de Valdeiglesias, where she traveled to stage the region’s recovery after the devastating fires suffered in July. Although the president quickly sidestepped regional issues to resort, once again, to her most well-known formula: shifting the focus of the controversies of her own management towards Pedro Sánchez.
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The appearance introduced, however, a tactical correction. After several days in which the president avoided answering journalists’ questions, today she did open the microphone to the press. But the return to questions did not mean a return to explanations. The visit to the winery, moreover, was not on the official agenda and took place within the framework of the tour that Ayuso maintains through the municipalities affected by the July fires, an area in which her team seeks to display management and recovery against the political wear caused by the penthouse.
“Do you think you have given all the explanations about the penthouse? Do you think these explanations are sufficient?” they asked Ayuso, who chose to dodge the issue: “If we take into account that 12 of the 15 ministers who have public housing never give explanations, yes.” The president then insisted that, after eight years at the head of the Community, “I have never needed nor asked for an official residence” and that she will not need one “10 months before an election,” in a defense that tries to dissociate the real estate operation from any residential use when it has been precisely her environment who has suggested that argument in recent days.
From there, the Madrid leader insisted on wearing down the Prime Minister. “After 16 days of this invasion tolerated by the Government and by Sánchez while he continues on vacation with his flip-flops in La Mareta,” said the Madrid president, who assured that Ceuta is “on the verge of collapse,” with security compromised and “major health problems.” Ayuso also spoke of a supposed risk of epidemics and of “daily assaults, rapes” in the autonomous city.
The president also took the opportunity to question the cost of Sánchez’s vacations and the use of public facilities by the president and his entourage. “I would like to know how much it is costing, which politicians and friends are using public facilities, not for one day or two but for an entire month, while Spain burns, is suffering an invasion and has enormous problems,” she stated.
The attack reached its peak intensity at the end of her speech. Ayuso called Sánchez “the politician with the least credibility in all of Europe,” whom she accused of being “on the verge of the bench” and “disoriented,” although “on vacation.”
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The choice of setting and argument was not accidental. While the controversy directly affecting her Government revolves around the acquisition with public funds of a luxury property whose purpose has been questioned by the opposition, Ayuso devoted much of her appearance to questioning the use of public assets by the central Government. But the firewall does not quite work as in other occasions. The purchase of the penthouse for 6.3 million euros through Planifica Madrid has become the main front of wear for the president, amid a judicial investigation after the referral to a court of the complaints against the public company. The opposition maintains that the property was intended, de facto, for Ayuso as a residence, while the Community defends its use linked to the Administration.
The maneuver is beginning to generate discomfort within the PP itself. Neither the national leadership nor the Madrid PP observe calmly the drift of a crisis that adds to the wear caused by Ayuso’s controversial trip to Mexico and that threatens to extend during the start of the political season. Asked explicitly if she feels supported by the national leadership of the PP, Ayuso also did not answer and again took refuge in management, citing the Pope’s visit, Formula 1, and the recovery of the areas affected by the fires. The concern is no longer limited to the opposition: in the popular environment, the difficulty of finding a political way out of an issue that continues to occupy media space is also beginning to weigh.
Más Madrid sees fatigue in Ayuso’s environment despite her feeling immune
From the opposition, the Minister of Health and leader of Más Madrid, Mónica García, has considered that Ayuso faces the controversy from a “sense of impunity” and has questioned that the president considers the explanations about the penthouse closed. García has described the arguments offered so far as “far-fetched and unjustifiable” and has maintained that explanations are still missing about an operation in which, in her opinion, a Madrid public company has been dedicated to “buying and selling and speculating with housing in Madrid.”
García went a step further by pointing out that even in Ayuso’s political and media environment a certain fatigue is beginning to be perceived in the face of her “bravado.” For the leader of Más Madrid, the frustrated purchase of the penthouse constitutes a “frustrated maneuver, and frustrating for her,” and she attributed to the president a way of exercising power marked by “bossism and crude feudalism.”
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