The international hangover of Isabel Díaz Ayuso is far from fading and threatens to overshadow even the San Isidro festival. The Madrid president has accumulated this Friday almost as many political reproaches as carnations have filled the vests and scarves of chulapos and chulapas. The offensive has united the Madrid left, has also jumped the regional perimeter, and has added socialist leaders from other territories with a common reproach. Having turned an institutional mission into a new front of ideological combat on which the regional president has remained silent today.
Read more Ebola resurges in DR Congo with the largest outbreak since 2018: there are already 65 dead
The spokesperson for Más Madrid in the Assembly, Manuela Bergerot, has not understood employer truces and has accused Ayuso of “insulting, lying, and muddying the public debate.” The regional parliamentarian describes the institutional trip to Mexico as “embarrassing” and censures that the Madrid president still has not clarified what she did for several days without an official agenda known, so faced with so many evasions, she has demanded that she directly “shut up from so many lies.”
Also read
The Más Madrid leader has also contrasted the relationships her party maintains with progressive Latin American governments and organizations with the strategy deployed by Ayuso during her Mexican tour. “She wants to become the diva of the Latin American right,” she said, before concluding that the Madrid president ended up being “a toxic asset” even for those who invited her to the country.
The criticisms have also been joined by the Minister of Health and leader of Más Madrid, Mónica García, who has attributed to Ayuso the will to try to “break diplomatic relations” between Spain and Mexico. García has reproached the regional president for traveling without coordination with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and has questioned her subsequent complaints about the lack of institutional protection. According to the minister, Ayuso “went to provoke and insult and has come provoking and insulting.”
The Socialist Party has also not toned down. The leader of PSOE-M, Óscar López, took advantage of the traditional San Isidro celebration in the Pradera to mock the failed trip of the popular leader. “Today we will hear chotis and not rancheras, although Mrs. Ayuso would have liked it,” he joked before assuring that the regional president has set up “the Sol circus, not the Cirque du Soleil.”
Asked about the Madrid president’s complaints about an alleged “ultra-left party” and an “orchestrated boycott” against her during her visit to Mexico, López defined May 2026 as “the May of Ayuso’s ridicule” and predicted that “the one in ’27 will be the one of change in Madrid.”
Read more A concert in Vienna supporting Palestine denounces Eurovision hosting Israel
The controversy has also taken on a paradoxical tone in the middle of San Isidro. While Isabel Díaz Ayuso denounces a Mexico immersed, according to her account, in a “hostile” climate and “extreme danger,” the City Council awards this Friday the Gold Medal of Madrid to Valentín Díez Morodo, president of the Casa de México Foundation in Spain and a benchmark for strengthening cultural and business relations between the two countries. The coincidence has accentuated the contradiction between the diplomatic tone the city council sought to project and the verbal escalation opened by the Madrid leader after her trip.
That controversy has also transcended Madrid politics. The Asturian president, Adrián Barbón, has accused Ayuso of disrespecting Asturias after the popular leader downplayed Mexican investments in the Asturian community by comparing them to what “a Mexican drinks in a few days in Madrid.”
The socialist leader went further and denounced the “contempt” with which, in his opinion, certain Madrid political sectors look at the rest of Spain. “Many autonomous communities are already fed up with a very small circle inside the M-30 considering that Spain is them,” he said.
The political pressure on Ayuso also coincides with the still open doubts about the real balance of her trip. The Madrid president has insisted on denouncing an alleged hostile climate and the lack of support from the central government but still has not specified the total cost of the tour nor the economic results obtained after a visit that intended to strengthen Madrid’s international projection and that has ended in an unprecedented political and diplomatic confrontation between a regional president and a foreign government.
Read more Israel and Lebanon agree to extend the ceasefire for 45 days, according to the U.S. announcement
