A young executive goes to Madrid for work, but she immediately adjusts to a hedonistic lifestyle, based on drinks, food and dancing, and she no longer picks up the phone except to lie to her partner, telling him that she is very busy and that she is forced to prolong her stay in the capital.
This script opening could lead to a romantic comedy or a porn movie. But it has given rise to a promotional video of the Community of Madrid, chaired by Isabel Díaz Ayuso, in which we also see the following: while said young woman is sitting on a terrace and telling balls to her boyfriend on the phone, the celebrity Mario Vaquerizo appears acting as a waiter (but made up like a zombie from the years of the movement) and recites a tourist spot in Madrid and its surroundings with a traditional accent, he convinces her to spend a few days relaxing and serves her a wine, which is from Madrid , of course.
This video is a worthy successor to another recording of merit, the one starring the mayoress Ana Botella, wife of José María Aznar, when she cast the hook for Madrid's candidacy as the venue for the 2020 Olympic Games, with her mythical invitation to take a “relaxing cup of coffee with milk in Plaza Mayor”. An invitation formulated in macaronic English that perhaps helped the IOC members to lean towards Tokyo and choose the Olympic venue.
If you look closely, there is a plot coherence that goes from Botella to Ayuso. The scenery prepared by the Madrid candidacy on that occasion read: "On s'amuse a Madrid, Madrid is fun". Which was equivalent to saying that in Madrid, synonymous with fun, one has a great time. And what has Ayuso been proclaiming since the days when the people of Madrid dropped like flies due to the covid? Well, Madrid never closes, because it is a paradigm of freedom, a paradise for beers and "I do what I want", which is why we are liberals.
That song to Ayuso's freedom had something of a smoke screen to cover his reckless health policy. But now it is different. We are going from that lethal anecdote to something more categorical: Ayuso does not miss an opportunity to tell us about the life and teachings of Madrid (the sleepless party) as the gospels told us those of Jesus.
We are not going to deny here that Madrid is a fun city. In fact, it is from old. I remember a scene, thirty years ago, on a terrace at the Retiro, at noon, in which a pensive young woman gave me this ontological reflection: “Oh, it's already twelve. I don't know whether to continue with the cafelitos or throw myself into the bottle” (of beer).
The question is how and why the authorities have decided to present Madrid as a parish of drinks, a temple of eating and a cathedral of dancing (and of golf and shopping and other leisure activities that take place in the promotional video). More than anything, because that is an incomplete vision of the capital, which displays many other attractions to seduce fans of the dock life. Or the lie. Or the scam.
Madrid could also attract other irresponsible people by advertising itself as the capital of tax dumping, which unsolidarily decapitalizes the other autonomous communities; or of the corruptions that its centralist institutional density fosters; or the box at the Bernabeu, where the private and public sectors make good and succulent crumbs; or of the parties with a vocation for the State subscribed to the regular and unprejudiced use of box B. In other words, Madrid as a land of opportunities for those who understand freedom as an instrument to go about their business... and, to the rest, who they mend
It is often said that freedom has a price. For example, the one that Ukrainians now pay for it. In Madrid, freedom (that of some, at least) also has its price. But it is different, and it is not paid by those who indolently enjoy it, but by the rest of the citizens who do not have enough for a comfortable life: those who do not receive decent wages or have access to housing or decent public health. In other words, those who may feel offended by Ayuso's video, whom she has already labeled as "envious" and "left-wing puritans", while the Complutense school threw her academic reliability overboard by naming her an "illustrious student". .
