Within Madrid's vast political, media, and business landfill, issues of public order, private matters, and intimate ones are rotting away, intertwined. We know that, in politics, personal relationships are decisive. The relationship between Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, the leader of the opposition, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, and the President of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, is one of sincere, triangular hatred. This isn't just political rivalry, it's not just about overthrowing a government: it's an intense, real, and deep hatred. The hatred also exists between Feijóo and Ayuso, but the tension with Sánchez clearly goes deeper.
Feijóo hasn't forgiven Sánchez for mocking him from the floor of Congress after the PP leader said he wasn't prime minister because he didn't want to be. It's a mockery that Feijóo hasn't let go of, and that's why on the 9th, when Sánchez appeared to announce the anti-corruption measures he intended to use in response to the Santos Cerdán and Ábalos scandal, he specifically brought it up: "He doesn't laugh so much now," he retorted. Then he added the reference to his late father-in-law's "brothels," and did so with a shout that was meant to be admonitory but sounded desperate.
Desperation increases when the financial advisory firm Equipo Económico, which has become famous in just a few days as a result of the revelations of the network of favors and extortions that Cristóbal Montoro built in the Ministry of Finance and within the Tax Agency, publishes a statement in which it threatens journalists and publishes journalists and they don't like it. Threatening journalists is mafia behavior, and the word mafia, which a few weeks ago was half of the slogan of a demonstration called by the PP against the sanchismo ("Either mafia or democracy," they shouted), now has a certain boomerang effect.
For her part, Ayuso has repeatedly displayed a presidential style that must be charismatic to her followers, but which seems grotesque to any outside observer. Now she's trying to justify why she and her family made private use of a luxury villa that the Community of Madrid purchased under her mandate, claiming that she brought the food in a Tupperware container and asserting that Spain is "a communist dictatorship." The accusation against her partner for tax fraud has also been confirmed, a matter that the president of Madrid has said concerns "a private individual" but which she herself has attempted to turn into a matter of state, with an attorney general indicted by the Supreme Court. Ayuso, let's remember, is the leader who told her son of a bitch a prime minister in Congress, and then praised himself with a childish joke about fruit. Feijóo can't stand her either, but he can't do anything but live with her because his leadership is much weaker. All this doesn't allow for predictions, because the Madrid pothole boils day and night, and it's unpredictable what new issue might explode at any moment. But it's dizzying and causes disaffection.
