The president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, has once again defended the mayor of Móstoles this Friday, who is accused of sexual and workplace harassment by a former councilor from his own party, the PP, despite the account of the former councilor in her complaint, filed on February 16 before the courts, and the fact that the Prosecutor’s Office requested a month later that the court on violence against women give procedural impetus and open preliminary proceedings. “He is magnificent and is doing a first-class job,” she praised him in statements to the media upon leaving the main headquarters of the European Commission in Brussels, where she met with the Agriculture Commissioner, the Luxembourger Christophe Hansen. She also used the same defense that the mayor and the rest of his team in the municipality have been repeating for weeks: “He does not know what he is being accused of. He is in a profound situation of inequality.” The Madrid PP, which pressured the victim not to report in up to three meetings with the leadership, has defended Bautista since the case became public and has launched a campaign to discredit the woman, who, after months of asking her lifelong party for help, resigned her councilor seat at the end of 2024 and left the party.
The complaint, which EL PAÍS has accessed and whose details became known this Friday, is signed by lawyer Antonio Suárez-Valdés, a specialist in harassment cases, and includes a first-person account from the former councilor, detailing all the situations in which Bautista made sexual propositions to her, how she repeatedly asked him not to act that way again, and how, after her refusal, the mayor, who had expressly chosen her as his second for the 2023 elections, discriminated against and made her invisible in the City Council and the party.
Ayuso returned to the idea that Bautista is a victim of a media persecution orchestrated by Pedro Sánchez’s government, a narrative that has been fueled in the Madrid PP since the statements became public. “That a mayor, of a municipality [the second most populated in Madrid after the capital], is national front page and the national topic of the day due to an accusation from one of the parties, seems to me to put him at a disadvantage and defenseless. That the Prime Minister and the entire Government come out strongly against a mayor seems to me to be an excessive, disproportionate political abuse,” she insisted, without referring to the fact that the victim first went to her party to take internal action on the matter.
The Madrid opposition has once again come out strongly demanding Bautista’s resignation ― who already said he would not leave office and presents himself as a victim of an “absolute discredit campaign” ― and accuses Ayuso of protecting the mayor.
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Manuela Bergerot, spokesperson for Más Madrid in the Assembly, comments that all the information points in the same direction, “that Manuel Bautista exercised a pattern of sexual and workplace harassment against a colleague from his party, taking advantage of his position of power.” The regional deputy criticizes the position of the Community president: “It is absolutely regrettable that Ayuso and the entire Madrid Popular Party have decided to side with the alleged harasser in this case. It is regrettable that they have decided to protect the mayor of Móstoles and abandon a colleague.”
The PSOE deputy, Lorena Morales, who also demanded explanations from Ayuso this Thursday in the Assembly, demands the next day that Bautista be “immediately dismissed.” “They tried to gag her and that was not the mayor of Móstoles, but Mrs. Ayuso with her henchmen, Ana Millán, who is still vice president of the Assembly and of Madrid, which is a shame that she remains vice president, and her number two in the party, who is Alfonso Serrano.”
Both Millán and Serrano met with the former councilor and tried to dissuade her from reporting. “The party’s protection means you have to take any kind of complaint out of your head,” Millán told her in one of those meetings. And the number two: “What can we do? It’s no use coming here to tell this situation without proposing a solution.” They even told her that if her account became public, it would harm her family, her husband.
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