Almeida goes to Abascal to unlock the budget negotiation between PP and Vox

With all communications cut off for weeks between the municipal groups of PP and Vox, and with no more theoretical partners with whom to negotiate the 2023 budgets, the mayor of Madrid has pulled the morning joker this Friday to unravel the "blockade" of which he claims to be a victim.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
09 December 2022 Friday 08:31
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Almeida goes to Abascal to unlock the budget negotiation between PP and Vox

With all communications cut off for weeks between the municipal groups of PP and Vox, and with no more theoretical partners with whom to negotiate the 2023 budgets, the mayor of Madrid has pulled the morning joker this Friday to unravel the "blockade" of which he claims to be a victim.

José Luis Martínez-Almeida has decided to "appeal" directly to the National Directorate of the ultra-nationalist party to request a more dialogical treatment by the group led in Cibeles by Javier Ortega Smith: "It cannot be that in the Community Rocío Monasterio says that the Budgets -by Isabel Díaz Ayuso- are a humiliation for Vox but they are approved for not blocking the Community, and that, in the City Council, Ortega Smith does not even sit down. It is not understandable ", he has transferred to the media from the Palace of Cybele.

Almeida refers to the fact that the Vox Parliamentary Group announced this past Monday that it will abstain in the final vote on the Budgets of the Community of Madrid for 2023 after the "failed negotiation" with the PP and after the Board of the Assembly will reject its partial amendments registered after the deadline on Friday.

In his argument, Almeida emphasizes that this 2023 could be "confirmation of the economic explosion" of the capital, for which he considers that "Vox has something to say about it. And if it does not, it must explain why, since it is not can block the Community but the city can".

What Almeida ignores is that relations between Ayuso and Monasterio have flowed in the legislature much more than his with Ortega Smith. In this sense, the spokesperson for the Vox Treasury in the Madrid City Council, Arantxa Cabello, maintains that her group is open to negotiating the 2023 budget with the municipal government by putting on the table a moratorium, not a repeal, of the ordinance of Mobility.

Mobility policies, and fundamentally the unfulfilled promise to repeal Madrid Central, is what has led Vox to block the City Council's budget processing. It already happened last year and, since then, the clashes and messages between both parties have only made any possible solution difficult.

For his part, the mayor of Madrid maintains that "a discrepancy in a sectoral policy cannot imply the blockade of a city" because it is "legally impossible."