The Contentious-Administrative Chamber of the Supreme Court has confirmed the two fines -which together total 960 euros- imposed in 2021 by the Electoral Board on the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, for "violating the principle of neutrality that public powers must respect during the electoral period", as established by the Organic Law of the General Electoral Regime (LOREG).
In practice, it comes to be a sanction for the use that Ayuso made of the institutional acts of the regional government for his own benefit and all this despite the fact that he had already received a prior warning to refrain from disseminating messages of electoral content.
The ruling refers specifically to an act held in the Plaza de las Ventas during the presentation of a mural tribute to the bullfighter Víctor Barrio, and a visit to some connection works between Valdebebas and the T-4 terminal of Madrid's Barajas airport after the presentation of an Iberia plane.
In the first act, among other mentions, he referred to the aid granted to bullfighting farmers; in the second, to the investment of more than 1,000 million in public-private collaboration projects with companies such as Iberia or Airbus; and in the third, to various urban initiatives carried out by his Government, such as the construction of 6,000 homes in a youth housing plan or the Madrid Nudo Norte development.
The sentences, for which judges José Luis Requero and Pilar Teso have been speakers, emphasize that "the neutrality of public institutions and powers is a basic principle that is accentuated by the demand for political neutrality in electoral periods in public spaces ".
And they emphasize that "this requirement limits the freedom of expression of the candidates in acts to which they attend, not as such, but in the exercise of their position and is imposed by the principle of equality of the contenders in the electoral process."
The fine has been confirmed almost two years after the facts denounced for what could be thought more than amortized by the offender. But given that the Madrid Statute of Autonomy establishes that, despite the electoral advance of 2021, the mandate arising from the new elections "will expire" when the official time of the "original legislature" expires, the sanction will be used as an electoral weapon of the opposition as there are only a handful of weeks left for a new campaign to start.
