Isabel Díaz Ayuso, president of Madrid, feels insulted. Personally. Deeply. The author of that affront, in her eyes, is Mar Espinar, the PSOE spokesperson in the Assembly. It is September 2025. Espinar has come to the Royal House of the Post Office, the government headquarters, invited by the baroness to participate in meetings with opposition spokespeople ahead of the start of the session period. Her sin is to deviate from the planned institutional script to ask Ayuso about Alberto González Amador, her partner, investigated for alleged tax fraud; his residence; and whether they share it. “The meeting is over,” says Ayuso, according to a source. “And she stood up.” A year later, the doors of the president’s office remain closed to the opposition. The tradition Ayuso wanted to establish has not survived the various crises over her place of residence. Even less so now, when the purchase by a public company of a penthouse worth more than six million that the president even visited continues to dominate the political news. No more meetings will be held, Ayuso’s team confirms. Nor, as used to happen, this September, on the eve of 2027, the year of regional elections.
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“The only thing they [the opposition spokespeople] came for was to create strife and insult,” explains Miguel Ángel García Martín, government spokesperson and Minister of the Presidency, as well as head of Planifica Madrid (the company that bought the penthouse). According to an eyewitness source, he was also the one who reacted most vehemently during the confrontation with Espinar.
Those meetings between the president and the spokespeople were presented by Ayuso and her government spokespeople on various occasions as a sign of institutional dialogue in contrast to the lack of communication that, in their view, the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, maintained with the opposition. Consequently, breaking now with that tradition, personally promoted by the president, is not an innocuous gesture, in the eyes of Más Madrid, PSOE, and Vox, the opposition parties in Madrid, who confirm one by one that they have not been called for a new round of interviews. Quite the opposite.
“It shows the sectarian closure of the Government,” they say in Más Madrid, the party of Manuela Bergerot, who leads the main opposition force in the Assembly. “They were tense meetings where the difference in visions for Madrid was evident, but there were also moments to share problems and solutions, for example when Ayuso learned about the chaos caused by the closure of line 6 at the very start of the university term a year ago and thanks to that express buses were put in place.”
This is how they see it in the PSOE: “Ayuso now only talks with Miguel Ángel Rodríguez [her chief of staff] and real estate agents. She has destroyed the last bastion of institutionalism. Since she kicked Mar [Espinar] out of her office for asking about the apartment, she has not called us again.”
A criticism shared by Vox: “We assume that the Madrid PP is too busy locking itself in to look for solutions to its own problems to sit down and talk about the problems of the people of Madrid.”
The reference alludes to the crisis triggered by the purchase of a luxury penthouse by Planifica Madrid. In April, the Community bought for more than six million a 485-square-meter penthouse in Chamberí, one of the most expensive areas of the capital, for President Ayuso to use “during the rehabilitation of the Royal House of the Post Office, whose work will begin in August.” The regional leader even visited it once acquired. The day after EL PAÍS published the news, and faced with the controversy sparked, Planifica Madrid, the public company buyer, put the property up for sale.
Return to the Assembly
Since then, Díaz Ayuso and her government spokespeople have tried to close a controversy that does not cease. In this context, maintaining the suspension of the meetings that began this January, when the previous session period’s meetings should have been maintained, deprives the opposition of one of the few spaces for direct dialogue with the president, and of an opportunity to place the penthouse crisis at the center of the debate.
“The last time it was nothing more than to insult me,” Díaz Ayuso herself explained then during an interview on Onda Madrid. “But not insulting me for a political criticism, which I also accept as part of my job, but personal criticism, direct personal insults,” she insisted. “There comes a time when I don’t know if this should be overlooked and left as if nothing happened,” she stressed. And she argued: “I don’t know what my adversaries do with their personal lives, I never dedicated myself to looking at it, nor will I. But I ask for the same for me, to be treated and judged for my work and those issues that affect the people of Madrid. (…) That broke down in the last (…)”.
The relationship between Ayuso and the opposition is practically nonexistent. The president does not even exchange greetings with Espinar, the socialist spokesperson. In fact, Ayuso maintains that Espinar has been the first political opponent to turn her back when they cross paths. The plenary sessions in the Assembly are an exchange of insults between the spokespeople in which many times it reaches the personal limit. The tone, back and forth, is full of tension. And the discovery of the penthouse makes the start of the political term highly tense. Precisely because of this, wouldn’t this be a good time for the Government and opposition to sit down and talk?
“Impossible,” they respond in Sol. “It was already suspended last time (in January) and nothing has changed on the part of the opposition: they don’t come to talk, but to insult,” says a source very close to President Ayuso.
At no time was it considered that this meeting would take place, the idea was never on the table. Another close advisor to the leader adds: “The opposition spokespeople have used those meetings to come with insults, something that is totally outside the objective of those meetings. In January it was decided to suspend them because they don’t come to bring proposals and debate, only to insult and therefore they lose all their meaning.”
These are words that describe an open wound. What is foreseeable, moreover, is that the prognosis will worsen soon. September brings with it the reunion of Díaz Ayuso with the opposition. It will not be in the meetings organized at the Royal House of the Post Office, but in the Madrid Assembly. There, next week, the debate on the state of the region will be held. A new face-to-face of Ayuso with Bergerot, Espinar, and Isabel Pérez Moñino, the regional leader of Vox. And then there will be no institutionalism that matters: the opposition, all their strategists concede, returns to the regional Parliament with the penthouse ammunition ready.
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