The Minister of Housing and Urban Agenda, Isabel Rodríguez, stated this Wednesday that she would "love" to intervene in the Community of Madrid using Article 155. She said this in an interview on TVE after being asked about the fact that regions governed by the PP (People's Party), including Madrid, are not applying the price cap. "What comes to mind? Well, I would love to intervene in the Community of Madrid using Article 155," she said. And the only thing preventing her from doing so, she added, is that the Socialists do not have a "majority" in the Senate, which is essential to validate the intervention of a regional government and is currently controlled by the PP. "If I had a majority in the Senate, I would have already implemented it [Article 155]," she insisted at another point in the interview. Rodríguez compared the price freeze in Catalonia to the situation in Madrid. with the "double-digit" increase in rents in Madrid Or that the 15,000 illegal tourist apartments detected in the Spanish capital, which could be converted into residential units, are not being closed. "The people of Madrid should know that the one restricting the right to housing [...] is the president of the regional government," she said, referring to the administration of Isabel Díaz Ayuso. "If you are not willing to assume this responsibility, I am willing to assume it," she concluded.

Sumar is raising its tone against the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party) and suggesting the resignation of Housing Minister Isabel Rodríguez in the face of the price crisis. "We need serious, brave, and innovative measures. And we are afraid that Isabel Rodríguez hasn't fully embraced this, and therefore should give way to whoever is willing to do so," stated Verónica Martínez Barbero, Sumar's spokesperson in Congress. Pilar Alegría, the spokesperson for the Spanish Parliament, countered that she does not share the request, and the Socialist party in the coalition maintains that it is "unjustified." "The groups must do their work to draw attention," Rodríguez herself reacted in the corridors of the Senate.

As the right and far right are gaining ground in the polls, Pedro Sánchez wanted his first political event of the year, in Malaga, to imbue him with a social discourse that would help him refloat a PSOE party that is going through one of its worst moments. To counter the strain of the Cerdán case, the judicial offensive against his wife, Begoña Gómez, and the Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz, and with governability hanging in the balance, the Spanish president wanted to set the agenda with another announcement regarding one of the areas the Spanish government considers a priority. Sánchez announced that the Ministry of Housing and Urban Agenda will require online rental platforms, such as Airbnb and others, to remove the listings for 53,876 tourist apartments for not meeting legal requirements. These are apartments that requested their mandatory registration number on July 1, but do not meet the requirements. These are homes that, according to Sánchez, can therefore be used for rentals to young people and families.

Although the new PP leader, the Galician Alberto Núñez Feijóo, had been more moderate on issues such as language immersion in Catalonia, this Thursday he has gone back to the terms of his predecessor, Pablo Casado, and claimed that in Catalan schools there is "a linguistic apartheid", words that Casado himself pronounced in December last year. In an interview with Onda Cero, Feijóo has accused the Spanish Government of being "the guarantor of a breach of the law" and has criticised the PSC for being complicit with the independence movement by signing the new law on Catalan in the classroom. This law received support from ERC, Junts, En Comú and the socialists. Feijóo believes the Spanish government should present an appeal before the Constitutional Court to suspend this decree.

With the outbreak of Catalangate all eyes were focused on whether it was viable or not to continue with the dialogue table. But there are also a dozen negotiations between ERC and PSOE that are directly threatened by the espionage case. These negotiations only affect Catalan laws, Spanish laws and bilateral folders between governments, which if they were already complicated to unravel before the controversy, now even more so. The Spanish government has shown this Thursday to be aware of the situation and its spokesperson, Isabel Rodriguez, has offered to "increase the actions" in favour of dialogue to try to recover the Generalitat's "trust". Despite this, from Madrid, President Pere Aragonès has warned that he will not guarantee ERC support on anything.

Pere Aragonès has not found the answer he was looking for from the Spanish government. The minister spokeswoman, Isabel Rodríguez, has asked him to "look away from a 2017 that was so painful for Catalonia" and has not put forward any proposals for the dialogue table Aragonès demanded this Wednesday at a conference in Madrid. The head of Territorial Policy attributes Aragonès's words to a "partisan strategy" and has postponed the next meeting between governments until the sixth wave of the pandemic is overcome, the same position Spanish president Pedro Sánchez defended in recent weeks.

"Can it be tolerated that there are teachers with instructions not to let children go to the bathroom because they speak Spanish?". The leader of the PP, Pablo Casado, continues to be immersed in a spiral of exaggeration about the situation of Catalan schools as a result of the Canet case. The right is using the first family that demanded their child receive 25% of their schooling in Spanish to attack the linguistic immersion model it has long had in its sights. This Friday, Casado decided to explain alleged situations that happen in Catalan schools where, according to him, there are teachers who do not let children who speak in Spanish go to the bathroom and who put stones in the backpacks of children who use this language: "Can we tolerate that children who speak Castilian in the break have stones put stones in their backpacks?"

Isabel Rodríguez believes "radical sovereigntism" is one of the main causes of the "damage to institutions" and of the "weakening of the State", in a line similar to far right Vox. She proved as much this Wednesday in the Spanish Parliament, when she told Vox MPs they "are not that far from the radical sovereigntism they criticise". The Spanish government spokeswoman referred to the episode last night in which MP José María Sánchez García refused to leave the house after the vice president of the parliamentary bureau, Alfonso Rodríguez Gómez de Celis, ordered his expulsion. The MP had called a Socialist parliamentarian a "witch" and ignored the three requests for him to take it back.