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.

The Popular Party has a closet full of flags that it brings out into public debate as it finds they can be useful. It parades them, surrounds them with noise, forces false disjunctions and equally false debates with them, and then brings out the next one. It doesn't matter if it's immigration, Catalonia and the Catalan language, the territorial organization of the State, the fight against corruption, the various negations it carries with it, or the defense of what it calls the family unit. It all consists of managing to parade a flag, or several flags simultaneously, and making a racket.Now we are talking about the unborn conceived, a grotesque concept that aims for a fetus to be another member of the aforementioned family unit. In this case, the flag comes from the looms of Ayuso and Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, experts in victorious flags, who have already legislated on the matter in the Assembly of Madrid (what an ironic name, Assembly of Madrid). Vox also wants to dispute it, this flag, because it suits them very well: after all, anti-abortionism and the denial of women's reproductive rights occupy a prominent place in the fascist/neo-Francoist ideology they promote from Abascal's party. There is also a component of stale sexism and patriarchalism: the creature begins to exist from the moment the father impregnates the lucky mother, or perhaps already when the father unzips his fly. As if all this were not enough, it is a discourse that is also supported by the MAGA movement and Trumpism. Thus, the unborn conceived is a finding that is in tune with the spirit of the times and deserves the nihil obstat of the new fundamentalism. Oil in a crucible.The idea of counting an embryo as a family member, besides being macabre and aberrant, is also very accurate. A few weeks ago, at the proposal of Vox, the unborn concept was discussed in the Balearic Parliament – a avant-garde chamber, since it is presided over by an far-right hothead with the support of the PP – and it was already seen that the idea is so good that they should also include dead relatives within the family unit. Thus we would have the unborn concept and the deceased already buried: all together they would form an ideal and very complete family unit.It goes without saying that the law approved in the Community of Madrid under Ayuso's absolute majority, and which Feijóo promises to introduce into a state-wide law if he governs, represents an alarming regression in rights and freedoms. It also raises questions: how does the unborn conceptus reconcile with Vox's national priority? And with Aznar's national majority? More specifically: is an immigrant embryo a member of a family unit? And if so, does this family unit, which counts its fetuses, deserve to be part of the national majority and, therefore, receive privileges reserved for citizens of national priority? Vox has already answered no. Or perhaps someone doubted that, among embryos, there are also first and second class ones? The problem with parading so many flags at once is that they trip over each other and everything.

Step by step, whether forced by pacts with Vox or on its own initiative, the PP is adopting the postulates of the far-right in different areas, such as immigration, gender violence, or, now, the anti-abortion agenda. Alberto Núñez Feijóo announced this Monday that when he reaches Moncloa he will promote a law for the unborn so that women can receive aid from the very moment of conception, when they confirm their pregnancy. It is a supposed law that is presented as social and in defense of the family, but which in reality seeks to establish an ideological principle that conditions women's rights, which is that, as Isabel Díaz Ayuso herself said, "the unborn is a person from the first minute".

Isabel Díaz Ayuso approved last week, thanks to the PP's absolute majority in the Assembly of Madrid, a controversial law on conceived but not born. The rule grants the status of family unit member to the embryo, so that, from the moment pregnancy is proven, families will be able to access maternity benefits without waiting for the birth. This is a measure that is part of in the cultural war against the progressivism of the Madrid president which, one year before the regional elections, is in full competition with Vox to prevent them from undermining this absolute majority. In fact, a few days after Juanma Moreno Bonilla had to give in to the far-right to be invested as president of Andalusia, Alberto Núñez Feijóo has announced that, if he is president of the Spanish government, he will follow Ayuso's steps and promote a state law for the conceived but not born.

Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, the all-powerful chief of staff for Isabel Díaz Ayuso, will not go "forward", using the expression he himself has so often used against PSOE leaders. The judge has decided to dismiss the case against him for leaking the names and photo of two journalists from El País who were investigating the tax fraud case of the Madrid president's boyfriend. After hearing the statements of both Rodríguez and Alberto González Amador, Ayuso's partner, the magistrate considers that there are no indications of a breach of secrecy, as stated in the order to which ARA has had access. The PSOE has already warned that it will appeal the decision.

New revelations complicate the situation of Isabel Díaz Ayuso's partner. A report from the Spanish Tax Agency (AEAT) indicates that a company owned by Alberto González Amador did not have "the necessary means for the provision of consulting services" that it billed to Quirón Prevención, as it was a company for aesthetic and beauty treatments.

The latest changes to public transport in the Community of Madrid have sparked a dispute between Renfe and the government of Isabel Díaz Ayuso (PP). Since this Monday, the census registration has become an indispensable requirement to obtain the public transport pass in the community, something Renfe rejects. The Spanish railway operator denounces that the regulatory change encourages "segregation" among users and "differentiation" when accessing a right and a service like public transport. The issue is that the Ayuso government's decision has caused controversy because it targets irregular migrant populations, who often face difficulties when registering in cities, as has been repeatedly denounced by various social entities or the Ombudsman himself. Furthermore, the change also comes at a time when the PP is embracing the "national priority" promoted by Vox, which means sidelining irregular foreign populations.