Once again, it seems that dawn is breaking in Spain
I must confess that I have spent a few years of great anxiety and concern about the drift that Spain has been contracting at the hands of leaders who, without disguise and with all their nerve, seek to make of it the opposite of what those of us who, with great enthusiasm and a strong dose of hope, were able to vote for the Spanish Constitution in 1978, committed ourselves to and conjured up for it, have been able to do.
We have seen everything and almost nothing good; the roles have been changed, so much so that even those who hated Spain for trying to break away or because they fought under and with the banner of terror, the blind bomb and the cowardly shot in the back of the head, are now the ones who have Spain's destiny in their hands. And all because of a shameful and execrable concession to their demands from a weak government (the weakest in the whole of democracy) that needs their votes or other support to revive their nineteenth-century ideas and maintain their perches in seats they neither honour nor respect. Seats which they do not hesitate to abandon whenever a new horizon arises where they can prosper, however uncertain it may be, or because they see that the continuity of their prestige or the personal or collective future of the group that dominates the designs of Spain with an iron stance and dictatorial attitude, although "officially" they proclaim otherwise, is endangered.
After the closing of the polling stations in Madrid, some lessons can already be drawn by way of conclusions, because they are so clear that they do not require much critical thinking or a structured analysis to reach their possible consequences.
The recent elections in the Community of Madrid are the result of a permanent state of alert on the part of president Isabel Ayuso, who, after many alarms and attempts at dirty and low blows, foresaw and anticipated the disastrous consequences of the "butterfly effect" that was born in Murcia at the hands of the greatest guru of perversity and hidden brain of the shadow government, Iván Redondo, with the invaluable and not at all "altruistic" collaboration of a party, Ciudadanos (Cs); a party already in agony after two years of obtaining its best results, as a consequence of its defective performance or inaction in Catalonia, diverse aspirations towards the left, personal quarrels, tripping and elbowing among its leaders to occupy the best positions or to have greater visibility.
Many observers and political analysts, including those in her own party, were not entirely convinced when the decision to call early elections was announced. But Ayuso was able to see the convenience, in spite of the many counsels against it, of dismantling that manoeuvre that was born among corrupt people in Murcia, to "officially" fight against corruption, invented and unproven in the PP.
This manoeuvre was soon truncated by an agile counterweight reaction and the attackers (PSOE and Cs) only obtained a minor piece, the mayor of the capital of Murcia, all to reach the point of taking by assault a motion of censure in the Community of Madrid.
Experience shows that Sánchez is an expert at getting to places through the back door or by moulding motions of censure based on lies and half-truths and even on false testimonies fabricated by anyone, including judges, without any justification whatsoever. One more manoeuvre of this kind to his credit was not uncommon and, moreover, being his usual self, he was in such an environment like a fish in water.
The quick reaction of the Madrid president literally left Iván Redondo, Sánchez and Aguado, the Madrid vice-president of Cs, who had spent the entire legislature putting obstacles in his boss's way, opposing her and even proposing things diametrically opposed to the ideology or official agenda of a government. It was a bald opportunity, and Ayuso realised that in one fell swoop she could get rid of those getting in her way and hurting her, and moreover, if she did it right, she could even obtain greater benefits or consequences, as has been the case, as we will see below.
After that reaction, the alarm bells went off in Moncloa; once the agitators were surprised by their careless and weakest flank, and in view of the internal polls provided by Tezanos' CIS, whose true results were hidden from most mortals, they understood that all kinds of obstacles had to be put in place to prevent them from being held.
Possibly, some perverse mind - most probably Redondo - pointed out that the serious problem generated during more than two years of continuous disdain, frontal attacks and manifest perversities against the president and the population of a region, at the time the most prosperous and generous with the rest - for contributing more than anyone else to the state coffers - was to place the most visible heads leading their parties in Coalition (PSOE and Unidas Podemos), Sánchez and Iglesias and hope that their personal pull would appease the impulses of daring Isabel Ayuso who, without much or any political support - not even in her own party - launched herself in search of an absolute majority, or at least enough, to govern alone and be able to apply her policies.
In this context, we learned of the abrupt departure of Pablo Iglesias from the government to head the candidacy of his party to govern the Community and lead the left in the region. This departure, decreed as a "cessation" in order to collect a large and lucrative subsidy. We saw a totally unbridled Iglesias; We saw him become someone to whom everything went out of hand, such as sending his personal hired thugs to boycott the words of Vox in Vallecas and attacking police forces with stones and sticks, while branding Vox party as fascists and sowing hatred or, overacting without restraint or decorum with rusty bullets as if they were a serious threat or calling him and his henchmen anything but nice to the voters and those who are comfortable following the ideas of the PP, its offers and its way of acting.
We also saw Sánchez in full essence, acting as the main actor in the first rallies, campaigning on a stale, civilist war and overly hackneyed ideology, with a poor Gabilondo - who was forced to confess that he was "bland" - acting as a back-up and making him change his whole background and programme up to three times in the short space of the campaign. A socialist party that has used many of its government officials for dirty and malicious propaganda, such as the absurd knife (magnified almost a hundred times) that the Minister of Industry eagerly showed to the press, accusing VOX, knowing that "the ferocious threat" was the result of the ravings of a mentally ill person, who even put his return address on the envelope in which it was sent".
The Minister of the Interior and the Director General of the Civil Guard have lost what little honour they had left by actively participating in the rallies, where they should never have appeared for the sake of the official neutrality of their position, by hiding very relevant data on the issue of paid activists, and by attacking the parties that had nothing to do with this fair mounted against them, which, because it was so crude, soon exploded in their own hands.
In short, once again we proved how low Sanchez's character was, since, as the campaign progressed and he saw that his attempt was in vain, he gradually abandoned and distanced himself from his candidate; so much so that, in order not to be splashed, he relegated him to a hotel near the PSOE headquarters so as not to be even slightly affected by the bad results that his forced invention reaped.
We have seen the head of the CIS lying through his teeth, putting the icing on the cake of the filth he has turned such a serious, famous, costly and well-endowed institution, which has never suffered so much as with him at the helm of lies, absurdity and degradation. Tezanos, who, in addition to holding this position through partisan connections rather than merit or worth, also runs a socialist magazine in which he took the liberty of offending the people of Madrid who voted for the PP, calling them "tavern-goers" two days before they were due to go to the polls.
The Spanish television station, RTVE, which during the middle of the campaign, a journalist in charge of predicting the weather on the TV news, wondered how it was possible that any Madrilenian could still vote for Ayuso, and nothing happened to her.
Cs (Citizens), the other party involved in the failed coven, in view of what was coming their way and the fact that all the blame pointed to the former vice-president Aguado, removed him from the spotlight and put their best current asset, Edmundo Bal to try to save the broken dishes of an announced catastrophe that they themselves had cooked up; who, although he did not do badly at all, made an effort and tried to glue the broken dishes with expired glue, the bad thing was already done and he reaped very bad results.
Ayuso, doing her own thing, gradually began to gain confidence, among her own and strangers alike; the main pollsters, who had been believing in her and her chances for months, soon highlighted her as the winner of a battle in which she was running alone against the world and without much support from the media and networks, except from some of us who have been encouraging her for years to continue in her endeavour, because we sensed that she could soon give the hungry wolves and the bad omens a great shake-up.
The VOX candidate, Roció Monasterio and her permanent musketeer, Abascal, managed to survive and advanced just one more seat thanks to the victimism to which the socialists and communists pigeonholed them, and because there was plenty to catch from the dismemberment of Cs. At the end of the campaign they had to lower the decibels and aspirations to present themselves as useful and necessary and were soon forced to stop aspiring to lead the right as a final result.
Finally, there is the hitherto unknown candidate of Más Madrid, Mónica García; a medical lady who lies more than she talks even in her CV. Despite her profession, she proposes in her ideology to dismantle the Isabel Zendal Hospital, as admired and necessary as it has proved to be in the midst of a serious pandemic, which says very little about her professionalism. Although, as the last link, she has been able to bring together those who are unhinged or tired of so many lies in a left in disarray because, perhaps, she is more moderate than all those who preceded her or accompany her in visible positions in her party and in the whole of the Madrid left. A woman who, with the same number of seats as the PSOE, has 5,000 more votes than the PSOE and therefore becomes the leader of the opposition, relegating the hitherto hegemonic party in the region to a very difficult third position. This is a delicate situation, and it remains to be seen what other consequences it will have at the national level.
Iglesias, as he had premeditated and commented last night, before the votes were fully counted, announced that he was leaving politics and all his posts, that he would not take up his seat as a regional deputy (in order, among other things, to receive the 15 months' compensation for his position as second vice-president of the government) and that he would devote himself to other tasks in the university teaching from which he emerged, being a mediocre untenured professor or collecting huge salaries in low-quality talk shows or Marxist propaganda programmes, financed by foreign forces or countries with obscure agendas that foment unrest in democratic countries with the aim of disturbing the peace.
With this gesture he has confirmed his inconstancy, that politics tires him, that he is neither serious nor tenacious and that his thing is airs and graces. Everything suggests that being at the helm of the last political force in the Madrid Assembly was not a dish to his personal alter ego's liking. We will soon see where this chicken bites and what worms it wants to feed on.
His personal departure may be the prelude to something else, just as the rodents abandon ship when it is about to sink, it may also mean that the party that was born of 15M and was on the verge, not long ago, of overtaking the PSOE, is giving its last gasps and will soon disappear like others that we have seen go from everything or almost everything to nothing in just a few years.
On a personal level, Gabilondo is very affected by having been forced into everything, and on seeing that his party has abandoned him, he may soon get his departure ticket and devote himself to other things, such as teaching, from where he should never have left.
Monasterio, in less than a day, has realised the reality and has already lowered his temper and offered her support for Ayuso's investiture, without apparently asking for anything in return; although she hopes something sweet may come her way in the future.
Edmundo Bal, in payment for his efforts, and like the generals appointed before the fall of Hitler, has been elevated to the second authority of a party in agony and which, like Podemos, will probably disappear from the political scene and be absorbed by others. Two complete failures in such a short space of time, both in Catalonia and Madrid, cannot be sustained.
The leader of the Madrid opposition will have to be very careful with her words, her outbursts and, above all, her attacks on Madrid's healthcare system, because they are typical of a riot and a banner and far removed from reality. It remains to be seen whether she will be able to propose something consistent that will help citizens. When she abandons her current position, she will be able to improve a lot, and if she does not, she will soon suffer the same fate as Podemos in a few more years.
Finally, Ayuso, who has shown herself to be a resilient solo gladiator, should not be taken in by the siren songs and self-serving compliments of those who once criticised her and now want to flatter her in case there is a cut to be made. Today she made some very serious statements on Herrera's programme and I think that this is the path she should take, not letting herself be impressed, rolling up her sleeves and getting down to serious work on her programme without letting herself be misled. She has a commitment and she must be clear about it, both personally and regarding the team she is going to surround herself with.
This is the epitaph of an election in which nobody believed, many despised and few thought that so many things could happen.