Hours before the Pope arrives, a climate of love for one’s neighbor was supposed to envelop the Madrid Assembly this Thursday. It is assumed that the Catholic heritage from centuries ago would somehow bring out the altar boy and the devout woman that all Spaniards carry inside. One would enter through the door, minutes before the session began, and run into Carlos Díaz-Pache, the PP spokesperson, with his hands together like a communion child, but not exactly talking about peace and reconciliation. Shortly after, in the plenary session, it was discussed whether Isabel Díaz Ayuso was going to heaven. The president of Madrid laughed at the left, suddenly being more papist than Pope Leo XIV. So now it turns out they are little chapels, she told them. Don’t be surprised to find them next Holy Week carrying the throne of Hope.
People wanted to know what Ayuso had talked about in her private audience a few days ago with the Pope. Leo is coming to Spain, but Ayuso went to Rome first just in case. They asked her if she had informed him that she is trying to sabotage the massive regularization of immigrants proposed by the central government, an extraordinary measure defended by the Vatican and even by businesspeople. Vox spokesperson, Isabel Pérez Moñino, poked Ayuso with this because she knows there is gold to be found here. She told her, with religious pomp, that for the president it is a “blessing” that they come from abroad, thus turning Madrid into “an infinite human vacuum cleaner.”
That angered the president, who at the beginning defended the role of foreigners. Thanks to them, for example, the necessary housing will be able to be built. But seconds later, in a change of tone, she supported the theory that about 700,000 people are being regularized to overwhelm public services and create chaos. Behind it? Pedro Sánchez, president of the Government. The real reason? To modify the census to win votes, in a kind of “electoral fraud” and an attempt to “import massive poverty.” She surely didn’t tell that to the Pope.
Around the corner were waiting PSOE and Más Madrid with the co-payment that the president tried to introduce to ALS patients. Her government wanted to take advantage of a loophole in the Dependency Law to reduce the maximum subsidy by 40%. The families of the patients complained, and yesterday Ayuso rectified: the money will be paid in full. Mar Espinar, socialist spokesperson, went there: “We are glad she has rectified the co-payment she tried to sneak in. I understand it wasn’t a heartfelt outburst, but someone must have told her to tone it down a bit.” “And look, the ALS law had the consensus of everyone, until you came along to make a scene. We all understood that humanity does not understand colors, but cruelty does have a name, and it is yours.”
Espinar challenged her to say she will never use the co-payment.
—That is false —was Ayuso’s entire response.
Espinar was on fire and returned to the regularization issue. “Have you told the Pope that you are trying to sabotage the immigrant regularization process because you are servile to the strong, but ruthless like no other with the weak? Have you told him you support Trump, the one with illegal wars; Netanyahu, the genocidal; Milei, the one with the slave labor reform?”.
Ayuso endured the downpour while Pache and Alfonso Serrano, secretary general of the PP of Madrid, were outraged by the socialist’s aggressiveness. The president responded that she would not fall into their “barroom” provocations. “She has never spoken about this before, she has never cared,” she reproached her. And she went to what hurts the socialists most nowadays: the corruption cornering Pedro Sánchez’s government. “Your party set up a corrupt scheme to defend the one at the cost of destroying democracy. You are here in the name of the sewer,” she said, then mentioning the judicial cases of Pedro Sánchez’s brother, the president’s wife, and former president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. “Let’s see the sewer they fabricate against my circle, we are already used to it.”
But Manuela Bergerot, spokesperson for Más Madrid, returned to the ALS co-payment: “What a backtrack.” She then moved on to the heat in classrooms now that temperatures have risen. “If you had your children in those classrooms at 35 degrees, those classrooms would already be air-conditioned.” Ayuso replied that most of her councilors also have their children in public education.
Since there was a smell of incense in the Assembly, Bergerot climbed the pulpit. “Is it Christian to sabotage the regularization of migrants and prevent them from accessing public healthcare? Is it Christian to remain silent about Israel’s war crimes and the murder of 160 girls? Is it Christian to let vulture funds evict families from their homes, raising prices through the roof? Mrs. Ayuso, members of the right, you have radicalized so much that the Catholic Church is much closer to the left than to the right.”
In the PP they burst out laughing. Pache and Serrano were having a great time. Ayuso told the left that she does not deign to attend state funerals and that now it turns out, without these being her exact words, that they are more papist than the pope. An imaginary liturgical music closed the face-off between the president and the spokespersons.
