The double dimension with which she has endowed the presidency of the Community of Madrid since her arrival in 2019 forces Isabel Díaz Ayuso to alternate her role as alternative leader of the opposition with that of regional president in her public interventions. Thus, in the Puerta del Sol press room, combative harangues coexist as the central government's battering ram with lower-profile speeches aimed at regional management.
His urgency to counterprogram many of the measures that emanate from Moncloa force him to always be on the tightrope by assuming certain risks derived from not taking the time necessary to evaluate all the scenarios. This has happened in recent days when, after caricaturing the transport aid announced by Pedro Sánchez in the last debate on the state of the nation as a simple "cheque-vote", the Community of Madrid has ended up completing the reduction of the subscriptions with an extra reduction up to 50%.
"It has been the same since minute one of the Ayuso era," Juan Lobato reproaches him. “The same thing happened during the state of alarm with the age-based vaccination strategy or, recently, with the care operation for those displaced by the war in Ukraine. He decided to open a device in the Zendal hospital when the Pozuelo reception center was already opened by the Government. In the end, the Zendal thing was useless, and everyone had to be sent to Pozuelo”, points out the general secretary of the PSOE-M in statements to La Vanguardia.
“As soon as a measure is announced by the Government of Spain, or even the European Union, she immediately goes out to say that it is crazy and that she is going to challenge it before the Constitutional Court or wherever necessary. But then he ends up applying it because they are beneficial measures for the people of Madrid”, she insists.
Something similar happened in October 2020. While the false summer normality evaporated after the arrival of the vaccine and the Executive proposed new 15-day confinements, Ayuso attacked Sánchez by shouting “closing is very easy, but opening is very complicated”. Weeks later, it was she who opted for the same. "Only essential days," she argued as a counterpoint. But, given the proximity between the Todos Los Santos bridge and the Almudena bridge, Madrid was closed, in practice, for the same time that the state of alarm was proposed.
Ayuso also strongly called for the cancellation of flights to Barajas from hot spots due to the pandemic "because the virus knows no borders." Although, in parallel, he congratulated himself on his strategy to control covid through "surgical confinement" by health zones. “As if the virus spread freely from one country to another while doing it from one neighborhood was impossible,” they ironized from Más Madrid.
Nor did he request extra controls or specific PCR at the main stations that function as a funnel for the arrival of tourists, while he did censure the Ministries of Health and Development for not doing so to monitor the arrival of foreign tourists by plane.
In the same way, he challenged the distribution of the vaccines by estimating that he was receiving a percentage lower than that offered to other communities while Madrid was in the queue for several months in terms of the rate of inoculations.
Looking ahead to the next school year, Ayuso assured with all the pomp of presidential speeches that he would censor textbooks that promote the "sectarianism" that emanated from the so-called Celaá law. Finally, no work has been withdrawn since, as he admitted in parliament, "the educational inspection has not detected anything relevant in the review carried out on 180 books."
To date, the formula of the multiverse has not been able to work out better for Ayuso who, from the already distant autonomous communities of 2019, has gotten rid of his "annoying partner" of the coalition (Citizens) -with the electoral advance of 4-M- , and former PP president Pablo Casado, who tried to hinder his meteoric rise.
But, if he had stepped on the brakes in time, the bad experience of having to back down and accept several of the grandly contested measures to erode the PSOE and United We Can coalition would have been avoided.
