The PSOE has spent almost a decade lurching and improvising in Madrid with its candidacies for the Community and the City Council. And it seems that it plans to continue doing the same in the face of 2023. That is the feeling, and the internal fire, that has been caused by the deputy general secretary of the PSOE, Adriana Lastra, this weekend closing the Municipal Socialist Convention Madrid Ciudad "We want Madrid" showing herself convinced that Mercedes González and Juan Lobato will be "two extraordinary leaders" of the capital and of the Madrid Community.
That announcement, coming from whoever comes, implies the unofficial designation of the current Government delegate as a candidate for next year's municipal elections without first going through any primary process as Lobato did, and won, to lead the party to regional level.
And, by extension, it is a setback for the current spokesperson for the PSOE in the City Council, Mercedes González, after the frightening of the previous socialist candidate, Pepu Hernández.
Lastra's appointment joins a long list of candidates for the great municipal and regional positions in Madrid in which, in just 4 years, Hernández himself and Antonio Miguel Carmona have stood out for the City Council, or Ángel Gabilondo and Hana Jalloul, for the community.
But Lastra has ignored those turbulences that have relegated the PSOE to being the fourth force in the City Council and the third in the Assembly and has taken the appointment for granted by focusing on attacking the PP whom he has accused of having turned the Community of Madrid into his "test laboratory" to carry out policies that favor the richest families and to create first and second class citizens.
He said it during the closing ceremony of the PSOE Madrid City We Want Madrid Convention, in which he urged his party not to lose "not a second" to "recover Madrid for the people."
Faced with right-wing policies, Lastra has claimed that of the socialists, who "combat fear, give hope to citizens and give them back the right to have a future, hope and a dignified life."
Because the Socialists, he has emphasized, "we were born to fight injustice", while the PP has turned Madrid into "its testing laboratory", where "it is experimenting" with policies that "already have results and consequences".
Some results that, according to Lastra, have been reflected in the report on exclusion and social development of the Community of Madrid, promoted by the Foessa Foundation, which emphasizes that it is in this region "where inequality has grown the most".
Meanwhile, the socialist municipal spokeswoman, Mar Espinar, has chosen not to air the controversy over González's appointment. He has limited himself to vindicating the work of his municipal group, which is "fighting tirelessly" to solve the daily problems of the neighbors, and has carried out an exercise in self-criticism in which he has come to recognize that the situation of the party in the capital is "critical".
“Our electoral bleeding has been constant; If we pay attention to the objective data, we only find one answer, which we are not going to like: the PSOE in Madrid has not spoken the language of the majority in this city, they have passed us by from the right and from the left”, has pointed out the spokesman.
Denying this reality in order not to assume it, Espinar has said, is an "error" that the PP is taking advantage of to "drown Madrid" and seize the "routines" and "expectations" of the people.
For this reason, the Madrid PSOE cannot afford "the luxury" of "screwing up again", despite the fact that the mayor has indicated that she does not see the glass "half empty" but "half full" thanks to the work of the charges organic and the group, which already knows "the answers that must be given" to give the electoral turnaround.
