Ayuso explodes over criticism of pandemic management: "They wanted to confront the elderly with beers."

BarcelonaAfter the audience success of the documentary 7.291, Regarding the management of the pandemic in the Community of Madrid, broadcast on Thursday night on TVE with a 15% audience share, Isabel Díaz Ayuso has not sat idly by and has gone on the attack. In an interview on Cope, she boasted about how her government handled it, despite the fact that it officially resulted in the death toll indicated in the documentary's title, although she has reduced it by half this week, and has asserted that contradicting the confinement measures imposed by the Spanish government has allowed Madrid to become an economic powerhouse.

"The commitment to opening up when everything was closed projected Madrid internationally and turned it into an economic powerhouse," Ayuso stressed. "The world knew that there was a region, Madrid, that is freedom," she added about those fateful days, in which Madrid ended up being the region with the highest number of deaths in Europe, according to the European Committee of the Regions. "They wanted to pit grandparents against beers," she simply said today in reference to her defense of keeping restaurants open during the pandemic.

"Everyone was closing without knowing why. There was a fury to prohibit, restrict, and ruin, but in the Community of Madrid we said No", the Madrid president puffed out her chest in relation to her management during the second wave. "We are living a unique moment in our history. Every week we are rewarded for our investments, for our real estate policies. 75% of the investment comes to Madrid, we have the highest salaries," she pointed out in this regard.

As she has done all this time in the face of reproaches for the high death toll, Ayuso has accused Pedro Sánchez's government of promoting a "war without quarter against their world, Madrid was a different region that did things better than the rest of Spain." Hence, she has not held back when it came to disqualifying the RTVE documentary.

"For years we have had to feel like we were called murderers. But the fact that TVE has made an unprecedented effort to distort the pain of the victims makes you see the scale of the issue," she denounced. She reproached the left for "calling demonstrations" when her government was doing "what it had to do," and gave the opening of the Zendal Hospital as an example. "They never helped us," the regional president retorted, framing the Spanish government's campaign within the "obsession" of all branches of government with harming Madrid.

Regarding the excess mortality in nursing homes due to the application of the so-called "protocols of shame" that prevented the transfer of elderly people to hospitals, Ayuso has denied it and has assured that other regions did so. "It seems that only people have died in Madrid, and those from other communities don't matter. It's inhumane. These protocols never existed, but they were applied in other communities," she said during the interview, despite the fact that Madrid was the only region that prevented the admission of elderly people from nursing homes with reduced mobility to hospitals, whose father was admitted to the Hospital de la Paz in an attempt to save him.

Ayuso and Almeida break ties with the PSOE

The aftermath of the documentary has also brought conflict to the institutions. The Madrid regional government has announced that it will file a complaint against the municipal spokesperson for the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party), Reyes Maroto, for stating, in statements to the media on Thursday, that the 7,291 victims were "murdered" in the region's nursing homes. And the municipal government, led by José Luis Martínez-Almeida, has also broken off institutional relations with the PSOE group. Maroto responded to the mayor that "you can't break what has never existed," as did Minister Óscar López later, along the same lines.

For her part, the spokesperson for Más Madrid in the City Council, Rita Maestre, has demanded that Almeida "lower his tone and stop the theatrics" after denouncing the PP's "hypocrisy." "The same people who call us Hamas Madrid, who say we are covering up for sexual offenders or covering up for corruption, or who blame us for the coronavirus for participating in the March 8 demonstration are the ones who now get offended and overreact when they feel something they don't like," she retorted. Previously, the Minister of Health and leader of Más Madrid, Mónica García, criticized Ayuso for "prioritizing propaganda over care" and said that she "was disloyal from the very beginning" to healthcare professionals and the State in "a political war with the central government."