“It cannot be that the Government of the Community of Madrid is in the middle of a self-destructive phase and we are not helping its demolition.” The phrase is from an intermediate position of the PSOE-M, but it summarizes the feeling that is lived these days in the party of the rose in the capital. In the Madrid PSOE, voices criticizing the lukewarmness of its parliamentary spokesman, Ángel Gabilondo, in his opposition to the Executive of Isabel Díaz Ayuso after the appearance of a protocol of action during the coronavirus crisis that discouraged the referral of elders from residences to hospitals in the region.
Not that Gabilondo is questioned, far from it. Not in vain was he the winner of the last autonomic elections – breaking a streak of several decades of socialist defeats – and only the right-wing agreement signed by PP, Cs and Vox deprived him of reaching the presidency. But he is required to punch at the table that hinders Ayuso’s parliamentary journey in the Vallecas Assembly, already burdened by itself due to its disagreements with the orange party, a coalition partner.
This is how the former Minister of Education has been urged in the last 48 hours from various sides of the Ferraz noble floor to show tusk. He is asked to act as a counterweight to an Ayuso who has become a true battering ram of the PP, with a recipe book of neoliberal measures, as a counter power to the Government of Pedro Sánchez. And Gabilondo has taken note, urging the regional president of Madrid to dismiss his health adviser, Enrique Ruiz Escudero, for the management of nursing homes during the coronavirus crisis and threatening to file a motion of censure. On the Vox or Popular Party onslaught scale, this is little more than a harmless scratch. But in Gabilondo’s history, it is a milestone. Because he manages “some times and some forms of another era”, indicate socialist sources,
The envelope of the PSOE to Ayuso does not end there, since the idea is to alternate Gabilondo’s offensives with attacks with the Moncloa seal, such as the one that the second vice president, Pablo Iglesias, directed yesterday against the Madrid president, denouncing that “what I saw in Madrid residences are a scandal, if not a crime. ”
It is still too early to gauge the success of the strategy, but Ayuso has already noticed the first shocks and yesterday he hastened to firmly reject any possibility of advancing the elections and called for “continuing to work” with Ciudadanos. There comes into play the second derivative of the operation and for which the PSOE is not interested in the Gabilondo style losing all its essence: the motion of censure. The distribution of seats would force the PSOE to add both to its left and to its right, weaving a hypothetical pact that would seat Ciudadanos, Más Madrid and Unidas Podemos at the table. An equation that has not prospered in any great place such as the Community and that only the good work of a spokesman without enemies and respected by all the colleagues in Parliament, as in the case of the socialist, could lead to success.