The day after Isabel Díaz Ayuso appeared for more than two hours in the Madrid Assembly without giving explanations about the luxury penthouse, the opposition's attacks provoked a reaction from the Madrid president after they accused her of "corruption".The penthouse and the chao, pescao will be the epitaph of her political life," declared this Friday the spokesperson for Más Madrid in the regional chamber, Manuela Bergerot. The opposition leader argued that the purchase of the 6.3 million euro property is "the definitive proof" that Ayuso "is corrupt". In the same vein, the PSOE denounced that the leader of the Madrid PP "has thought herself God and has become drunk on power". "The penthouse is a before and after. Her bargain is over, and her political career too," asserted the socialist spokesperson, Mar Espinar.

After a summer haunted by the luxury penthouse scandal, in what has been the most compromising episode of her political career, Isabel Díaz Ayuso has tried to turn the page on the crisis by claiming that both she and her executive are in top form and have "more desire than ever." That is the message and energy she wanted to convey this Thursday in a two-hour appearance at the Madrid Assembly, which is holding the debate on the state of the region, in which the Madrid president offered no further explanations regarding the controversial purchase of the property. "Let's talk about issues that really matter" with "optimism and enthusiasm," claim sources from the PP of Madrid. The popular bench gave a standing ovation to Ayuso's intervention, whom even internal voices had questioned over the management of the luxury penthouse controversy, and their leader boasted about her project without making any self-criticism and focusing her speech on reeling off a cascade of announcements –"100 new measures" in various areas– and on attacking Pedro Sánchez.

Obviously, the headline is ironic. And if not, judge for yourselves. It turns out that Eduardo Inda has published an interview with the President of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, on the eve of the Formula 1 Grand Prix celebration. And what follows are the questions he asks her, all very witty and, above all, incisive. First: "We have toured the entire circuit, there are a lot of Spanish flags, right? That's a bit far-right, a bit fascist, a bit reactionary. And that flag, which is bigger than the one in Colón...". Second: "At every turn, everywhere there is the Spanish flag. The government delegate, Francisco Martín, would surely have preferred Bildu flags". Third: "The truth is that what we have seen is impressive, colossal, there is nothing like it in the world". Fourth: "The area full of bars and restaurants is very good, it looks like the Plaza Mayor, with very well-known places. Whose idea was it?". Fifth: "I love so many Spanish flags, I'm very fascist, very far-right, but I love it". Sixth: "What did you think of the banked turn?" Seventh: "They say it will be the circuit with the most public transport in the world". Eighth: "You said that the Grand Prix would not cost the taxpayer a single euro. Do you maintain that?" (This is the only question that is saved, and Ayuso's answer is: "Why can the Catalonia Grand Prix have 40 million and Madrid zero?" In other words, it will cost the taxpayers money.) Ninth: "Manuela Bergerot, spokesperson for Més Madrid, who is a picturesque character, has said that the Grand Prix will not contribute anything to the people of Madrid". Tenth: "Will the Prime Minister come?" Eleventh: "Will any minister or representative of the central government come?" Twelfth: "And the friend of Bildu and ETA, the government delegate".

At this point, the only interest of the political figure of the president of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, is to personify the idea of banal power: raw power that has no other objective or purpose than to keep power itself running –and to benefit from it, of course, herself and a circle formed by accomplices and usurers (to whom favors must be returned with interest)–. Her ideological positions are inconsistent, vague; even her anti-Catalanism is routine, a chapter from the same instruction manual that also includes Madrid nationalism, the exaltation of the “Christian roots” of Spanish culture (whatever it is that these people understand by Spanish culture), the vindication of Spanish colonialism in America, anti-feminism, or the denial of climate change and the pandemic.The Community of Madrid –an administrative and political artifact that should be discussed in depth, starting with its very reason for existing– has long since become an optimal gear of this way of understanding power, in which politics, finance, justice, and the media configure, in effect, a state within a state, with its own laws written nowhere but known to everyone. An oligarchy, if you want to call it that. The most forceful staging of the effectiveness and refinement achieved by this gear is the confrontation between the Community of Madrid and the government of Spain presided over by Sánchez and with the Generalitat presided over by Illa, as powers aligned within the socialist sphere. The most raw and spectacular episode –so far– of this confrontation has been starred in by Ayuso and her advisor Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, a character who completely contradicts the profile of spin doctors as brains hidden in the shadows or behind the scenery of power. Rodríguez, who is a loudmouth, is enthusiastic about cameras, microphones, and social media, and he allowed himself the luxury of announcing step by step the fall of an entire Attorney General of the State without the judiciary, which had to carry out the script that Rodríguez was anticipating –the Supreme Court–, having any hesitation at all when it came to carrying out such a clumsy and brazen move. On the contrary, there was clear self-satisfaction in it all.One of the most recognizable ingredients in this recipe for understanding power is impunity, which has intoxicating, stupefying, and aphrodisiac effects. Just as it acts as a state within a state, the power of the Community of Madrid also likes to act as a party within the party, and Ayuso and her circle have created the myth of having toppled a secretary general and presidential candidate (Casado), and of having the next one (Feijóo) in their hands. But lately, Feijóo has allowed himself to leave Ayuso alone in the penthouse scandal and at Friday's meeting of the Fiscal and Financial Policy Council, which was attended by all the barons of the Popular Party, in contrast to Ayuso's snub. Impunity is a substance that has powerful highs, but also sudden crashes.

It is common that when a media outlet breaks an exclusive, they claim the topic and follow it up in detail, among other things to prevent others from appropriating it. "This topic must be ours," is often heard in newsrooms. This is precisely what is happening these days The Country with the news of Isabel Díaz Ayuso's penthouse, revealed on July 28 and which is still ongoing, to the despair of the Madrid president, who on August 24 complained that "the gum could no longer be stretched" on the penthouse, in that speech crowned by a very traditional "goodbye fish". But The Country has continued to publish information almost every day, and even a delicious piece on which the obsession of Spaniards with penthouses was analyzed based on cinematographic references such as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

The choice of words is important, as is the non-choice. With levels of language, orality, false rhetoric, imposture, care, swear words, barbarisms, slang, we build a way of understanding the world. On the trip to Sicily that we took with readers of ARA and Il Viagetto, a Sicilian woman explained to us that she and her daughter understood each other with a language of signs and facial expressions that, on the other hand, her son, who lived in England, did not understand. The gesture of cutting the throat, furrowing the brows and bringing the fingers together – “Like a magnolia”, as Víctor Català would say – touching the heart, touching the nose... We imitate the everyday way of speaking of mothers, grandmothers, and politicians.

Isabel Díaz Ayuso's all-powerful chief of staff, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, has taken offense because a media outlet, in this case El País, published that the Madrid president has rented an apartment in an exclusive urbanization in Puerta del Hierro. "It's the first time a politician's home is being persecuted... Incredible," he tweeted.

It has been twenty days since the scandal of Isabel Díaz Ayuso's luxury penthouse came to light, and the controversy continues to haunt the Madrid president. The political and media brawl is intrinsic to the way the leader of the PP of Madrid operates, but the type of operation and the communication management carried out by the Community of Madrid in recent weeks has turned this episode into the one that could most harm the popular leader, just ten months before the regional elections.

When I was starting to worry about not finding good merchandise to start my summer shift in replacement of Àlex Gutiérrez, I came across a piece that, on its own, would be enough to write a whole week of Pareu màquines (don't worry, I won't). It's a piece from the supplement Yo Dona, from El Mundo, titled as follows: “Isabel Díaz Ayuso wears her summer fetish dress to La Paloma: plunging neckline and cut-outs at the waist to show off her abs”. I really don't know where to start.

An “anti-party” that “does not align with any ideology” and rejects the “regime of 78” is responsible for the National High Court investigating the massive entry of migrants into Ceuta and that, in parallel, a court in Madrid has opened a criminal case regarding the purchase of the luxury penthouse for Isabel Díaz Ayuso. It is Iustitia Europa, a group known for intervening as popular prosecution in judicial cases involving the PSOE environment and which will make the leap to general elections in 2027. “We are transversal and we defend that the solution to corruption must come from civil society. After almost fifty years, we have a serious problem in Spain and we must move away from left-wing and right-wing ideologies,” defends its president, Luis María Pardo, in conversation with ARA.

Isabel Díaz Ayuso has arrived at the month of August more cornered than ever. The controversial trip to Mexico a few months ago, the judicial investigation against her partner, and the management of the serious fires that have affected the Community of Madrid are added to the latest controversy that has shaken her figure. This is the purchase and subsequent hurried sale of a luxury attic in Chamberí with a value of 6.6 million euros — the Community of Madrid published the sale announcement this Friday — surrounded by contradictory statements and unconvincing justifications. Initially, the Madrid government maintained that it had to be converted into a temporary office – even though it is not enabled as such – during the works on the Royal House of Correos, headquarters of the executive. But 24 hours after the information was made public, it hurried to sell the property, claiming that it would be used to rebuild the Western Sierra after the fires.

There are rights that protect specific freedoms. And there are others that, in addition, allow us to measure the democratic quality of a society. The right to abortion belongs to this second category. Not only because it guarantees that no person can be forced to carry a pregnancy against their will, but because it establishes a fundamental limit on the power of the state: deciding about reproduction. That is why it is one of the most reliable indicators of democratic health.Every time this limit is questioned, the debate goes far beyond abortion. What is at stake is the relationship between people's autonomy and the ability of public authorities to intervene in bodies, families, and the model of society. It is no coincidence that sexual and reproductive rights are among the first objectives to be overthrown by authoritarian projects. When a power seeks to redefine who is part of the community, who should reproduce it, and what values should sustain it, it ends up governing reproduction.We saw it in 2013 with the Gallardón counter-reform. Feminist mobilization demonstrated that frontally restricting the right to abortion had an enormous political cost. But reactionary offensives do not disappear when they fail. They mutate.Today the debate is filled with concepts such as birth rate, family, maternity, "culture of life",unborn child or demographic crisis. It seems we are changing the subject, but the dispute remains the same: who governs reproduction.This displacement responds to a profound crisis. Precariousness, the crisis of care, aging, difficulties in accessing housing, and migratory movements question the way we sustain life. Nancy Fraser describes it as a crisis of social reproduction, a crisis that affects the conditions that make life itself possible.Faced with this, feminisms propose expanding rights and guaranteeing the material conditions so that all people can freely decide whether they want to have children, when, and under what conditions to raise them with dignity: the horizon of reproductive justice.Authoritarian projects, on the other hand, ask what reproduction the state needs. They annul reproductive autonomy as a starting point and open the way to a demographic and identity policy, an old and powerful tool of social control with which Margaret Atwood made us shudder in her dystopia, and which today reappears in many Western democracies.The pieces are fitting together. The unborn concept of Ayuso and Feijóo as a legal category; the family law from the PP-Vox agreement in Andalusia; the maternity offices in Alicante and Seville; the mandatory listening to fetal heartbeats in Castile and León; the speeches on "national priority" and the theories of "great replacement" are not unrelated or independent initiatives, but rather form part of the same conceptual framework. An entire political architecture that progressively displaces the debate and hierarchizes which families and which maternities deserve to be protected and which do not so much.Its strength is that they no longer need to attack the right to abortion head-on, it is enough to shift common imaginaries. To make the question stop being whether women should be able to decide about their bodies and become about how the state should respond to the demographic crisis or the protection of "life". The Overton window on reproduction: it does not eliminate rights overnight, but rather turns what seemed unthinkable into socially acceptable.

The controversial purchase –and subsequent sale– of a luxury penthouse in Madrid's Chamberí neighborhood has reached the Court of Auditors. It was reported by a lawyer who, given the “impossibility of accessing” the documentation on this operation, wished to “bring to the attention” of the supervisory body a “set of facts that appear to have caused a deficit to public funds”. The case broke out last week, when The Country revealed that the Community of Madrid had bought a 485 square meter luxury penthouse to serve as a "temporary office" for Isabel Díaz Ayuso's government during the works at the Madrid regional government headquarters in Puerta del Sol, although this was not known. Despite this, 24 hours later, the executive announced that the property would come and would allocate the money to the reconstruction of the fire that has devastated the western mountain range.

The saying that some news is better understood when placed side by side sometimes works. For example, it is a fact that the Community of Madrid has purchased, through a public company, a nearly 500-square-meter penthouse in one of Madrid's most luxurious areas. This purchase, valued between four and six million euros, was made without public bidding and was not budgeted for anywhere. The response from the president, the inevitable Ayuso, has been to play the victim once again (she stated she is once again the victim of a "smear campaign"). She also offered a kind of explanation according to which this luxury penthouse will be an "office" where "institutional meetings can be held temporarily" while renovations are carried out on another building, and that it is not clear if she will have to use it. On the same day, Ayuso announced that they were opening a section on the Community of Madrid's website to "safely channel donations for the reconstruction of the Sierra Oeste," and the next day, the Community made the astonishing announcement that they will now sell the penthouse in question "to help those affected by the fires": neither is public money managed like this, as if it were a child's game, nor are citizens necessarily idiots. "Reconstruction," by the way, is the word used by the Generalitat Valenciana to administer, also with notable opacity, the funds intended to repair the damage from the storm of October 29, 2024. Still in Mazón's time, the Generalitat's coffers received twelve million euros in donations from citizens who wanted to contribute to this cause, of which nothing more has ever been heard. There is no news that either Mazón or Ayuso have had to appear before the courts for the very alleged corruption surrounding them.On the contrary, it is another known fact that, despite the forceful ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in favor of the amnesty law, and despite having granted a handful of more technical amnesties in homeopathic doses, the Spanish Supreme Court refuses to grant amnesty to the political leaders of the Procés for a crime of embezzlement that has only existed in the imagination of the accusers and the magistrates who convicted them. The call for a referendum on self-determination was part of the electoral program of the parties that formed a fully legitimate and democratic Government, and with the expenses to carry out this referendum, it has not been proven that anyone profited from it. Furthermore, the then Minister of Finance, Cristóbal Montoro, stated that "not a single cent of public money" had been spent on "the Chinese ballot boxes". By the way: the so-called Montoro case, a major corruption scandal in which the Tax Agency and the Ministry of Finance would have been used to commit extortion and other crimes, has seen the judge extend its investigation by six more months this week, a speed inversely proportional to the gravity of the case. As we were saying: sometimes, putting news side by side helps to understand it better.

The Community of Madrid has decided to get rid of the 485-square-meter penthouse it bought as a "temporary office" for Isabel Díaz Ayuso's government, as reported by the Madrid government this Wednesday at noon after its governing council meeting. This comes after 24 hours of controversy since the purchase of the property was made public following information from "The Country, Ayuso's government has decided to include this penthouse in the sale of four properties owned by her located on Gran Vía in Madrid.

The Community of Madrid has bought a 485-square-meter penthouse as a "temporary office" for Isabel Díaz Ayuso's government, as published this Wednesday by published this Wednesday El País. The Madrid president has admitted the purchase of the property, in the residential neighborhood of Chamberí and which includes a 199-square-meter terrace, but has assured that it is not clear that she will use it personally and has denounced a campaign of "discredit in full emergency" due to the fires. "It's false, I'm not buying anything nor are they buying anything for me," she said at a press conference, although she acknowledged that the apartment is one of the spaces that will be used during the rehabilitation of the Royal Post Office, headquarters of the regional government. The opposition has denounced the situation and has called for explanations.

Double message from Pedro Sánchez from the advanced command post of the fire ravaging the Community of Madrid and which has burned almost 10,000 hectares. The Spanish president warned that the situation “remains complex” because, although temperatures have dropped, it is not known “what the evolution and intensity of the winds will be” in the coming hours, but at the same time he has not ruled out that, during the weekend, there will be a “window of opportunity” to “fight the fire and protect lives and population centers”. He verbalized this after it was reported that, during the night, both the Madrid fire and the Ávila fire – which has burned between 13,000 and 15,000 hectares – have remained out of control despite the efforts of the firefighters.

The fires that are devastating the south of Madrid, Toledo, and Ávila in a completely uncontrolled manner have not brought a truce between the Spanish government and the executive of the Community of Madrid. After the Madrid president Isabel Díaz Ayuso requested on Thursday night the declaration of a national emergency "due to the seriousness and simultaneity of forest fires in three autonomous communities" and that the Military Emergencies Unit (UME) joined the extinction services, this Friday Minister Óscar Puente has lashed out at the popular governments for this way of facing forest fires.

The law of the unborn conceived, promoted by Isabel Díaz Ayuso in the Community of Madrid and assumed by Alberto Núñez Feijóo as a promise if he reaches Moncloa, is ambiguous because it is presented as a policy to promote birth rates and support families, but it turns the aid into the gateway to an ideological framework that could put reproductive rights at risk.Allowing pregnant women to receive benefits from the 14th week of pregnancy may seem, at first glance, like a simple administrative modification. And it is true that, legally, this law does not modify the state norm that regulates rights related to sexual and reproductive health, including the right to abortion. But its scope is not exhausted in the letter of the law. Behind it is the will to introduce, step by step, the postulates of the anti-abortion agenda of the extreme right.The great legal transformations do not usually suppress rights from one day to the next. They usually modify the conceptual framework from which these rights are interpreted. Ayuso's initiative is inspired by the American movement of the "fetal personhood, which has gained significant traction in recent years in the United States. Its goal is to create a "fetal personhood" that shields the rights of the unborn above all others, thus coming into conflict with reproductive rights, including access to abortion, contraception, and even fertilization in vitro.To understand what this concept implies, it is interesting to follow the chronology of this biological process. Embryonic development begins with the fertilization of the ovum by the sperm when they unite to form a zygote; after a few days, the blastocyst implanted in the mother's uterus gives rise to the embryo and, around the ninth week, the embryo becomes a fetus. Science can describe this path, but it cannot point out the exact moment when a developing human life becomes a "person". This answer is not scientific, but moral, philosophical or religious. And now it also wants to be political, to end up ideologically governing public policies on the beginning of life.Prenatal life deserves moral consideration. But one thing is to recognize moral value in prenatal life and quite another to make it a subject of rights comparable to a born person. The Madrid law for now does not restrict any of the woman's rights and can be read solely as an aid to motherhood. But it is not neutral, because it shifts the debate towards the status that the unborn should have. And this movement is slippery. First it is said that the conceived counts so that the parents receive aid. Then, that if it counts to obtain it, perhaps it should also count for other purposes. And finally, that if it has rights in some areas, it is not understood why it should not have them in all. The underlying problem is that some postulates that the extreme right engenders and to which it gives life can end up weakening, to the point of making them die, recognized democratic rights.

With Juanma Moreno Bonilla handed over to Vox, in the baron popular has lost, at least publicly, the moderate label it had earned by contrasting its ideological profile with that of Isabel Díaz Ayuso. The PP is convinced that if it wants Alberto Núñez Feijóo to reach Moncloa, it will have to be hand in hand with Vox. That is why the popular party has been paving the way for pacts with the far-right at the regional level and, in recent days, the popular leader has tried to join in. Of course, with his clumsy style and following a rather erratic line.