Isabel Díaz Ayuso needs Rocío Monasterio and vice versa. The only way for the PP to gain support in the Madrid Assembly, in the same way that the only possibility that Vox manages to carry out a single one of its programmatic proposals, happens because the two rights understand each other. For this reason, and despite the fireworks of recent days, both parties will agree for the regional president to carry out the regional budgets in an electoral year. In exchange, the ultra-nationalist spokesperson may hang a medal in the form of an amendment to the regional accounts.
They had no other. The alternative, in fact, was to break the de facto coalition that the two right-wing groups have maintained since the beginning of the legislature and start an all-out war for their electorate. But six months of wear and tear until the regional elections is a horizon that is not convenient for either PP or Vox, as was already made clear after the threat of seconds to propose an investigation commission for the management of residences in a pandemic and that spurred to the left always on the lookout to erode the conservative bloc.
The curious thing is how quickly the waters have returned to their course. Because in just a few hours the PP has gone from accusing Vox of "lying when appealing to an alleged computer failure that the Chamber's services forcefully denied", to accepting the incorporation of some of said amendments despite the fact that you are not They were completed neither in time nor in form by the parliamentary group led by Monasterio.
What has happened in between is that Vox threatened to go from abstention to negative vote in the voting of the accounts that will take place next Thursday, December 22. That would force Ayuso to extend the accounts and would tarnish his management file in the middle of an election year.
So the regional president herself has taken it upon herself to ward off any ghost by reaching out to Vox in an interview on esRadio in which she has spent several minutes justifying what happened: "In recent days they finally presented 89 amendments and when we went to debate them, After a minute and a half they got up from the table because they said it was humiliating and we hadn't even started to negotiate anything. They presented their late-term amendments late and on top of that a third of them were wrong."
"From there, what can I do?" Ayuso continued. "The Assembly of Madrid is not the Parliament of Catalonia and it is not the Congress of Deputies of Mrs. Batet, it is a chamber where now, not with Cs when he presided over it, now the regulation is always carried through to the end. (... .) But it is clear to me that throughout 2023 we can talk in a thousand ways to see how we can do so that many of these amendments can be incorporated".
Now it remains to be seen what will be the amendments that will be introduced a posteriori in the budgets and that, as Monasterio warned, are non-negotiable after the "humiliation" to which the PP has subjected Vox during the negotiating process.
The formation of Santiago Abascal prioritizes, among others, that "the item in institutional advertising (62 million euros) be reduced for the promotion of the presidency and that, in exchange, it be used to raise the salary of medical professionals in Madrid who deserve a fair remuneration" and that "an item of 1 million euros be urgently included to improve the working conditions of paediatricians". Which would allow them to score a point now that the health strike has entered its fourth week of strikes.
