The degree of isolation of Isabel Díaz Ayuso within the PP is the talk of the town these days in the corridors of Génova and in the chats of deputies and party officials. Any sign is used to interpret whether someone is on the side of the Madrid president or not, now that she is in trouble over the strange purchase with public money of a luxury penthouse worth 6.3 million euros. The one everyone watches most closely is Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the leader of the Popular Party. More than one raised their eyebrows when he left on Wednesday from the march in support of Ceuta without saying goodbye to her. Feijóo, at the end, asked about an old friend of his, according to witnesses, and then made a gesture as if to go look for him among the crowd. He was not seen again.
The anecdote does not reveal any distancing ― it could have been something circumstantial ― but it shows the zeal with which everything that happens inside the party is analyzed in this new start of the political course, especially what has to do with Ayuso.
Where Ayuso has clearly been left alone is in her attempt to boycott the meeting of the Fiscal and Financial Policy Council (CPFF) between the autonomous communities and the Ministry of Finance. The Madrid Government tried to get the regions governed by the PP not to attend the Government’s call to show their disagreement with the new model of autonomous financing. In the PP meetings, Madrid proposed that if all the administrations they govern were absent, they would paralyze the reform, because at least half of the territories were needed to approve it. “Madrid has maintained the usual stance,” explains an advisor very close to Ayuso. “We already explained it from day one. Each community defends itself from this robbery as it sees fit,” he adds. The Andalusian Government said it respected the stance of the Madrid president but relied on the freedom that each autonomous president has to decide on this issue. There are popular barons who, in private, were already very critical of the strategy of the Madrid leader in multilateral forums such as the Conference of Presidents held in Barcelona, where the controversy led by Ayuso over the use of simultaneous translation earpieces overshadowed the positions of the different territories.
Behind closed doors, in the Madrid PP no one denies that the president is going through her greatest moment of crisis since she came to power in Madrid in 2019. Neither she nor her advisors have managed to give clear explanations of why the public administration would be interested in buying a high-end property, through a real estate agency that the great fortunes use to sell their properties, which could not be used either as an office or as a presidential residence. The mystery has Ayuso at a standstill, as much as the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, with the Ceuta crisis.
Read more In this town, AfD won its first mayor in Germany and has been growing ever since
However, Feijóo has not let go of the president’s hand. In fact, this Saturday he will be the headliner at the event that the Madrid PP holds every year with its deputies in the Assembly and which serves as the starting gun for the regional political year. Although Feijóo already attended the previous two years — just like with the Galician PP — this one has a special meaning because of the critical moment Ayuso is going through. Neither the popular leader nor his spokespeople have been very enthusiastic in defending her; they have always referred to the explanations given by the Madrid Government, but they have neither questioned her in public nor sown doubts. Feijóo caused some stir by saying, on August 23, that Planifica Madrid, the public company that carried out the real estate operation, should explain “why it bought a property that cannot be used as an office,” a statement that, taken out of context, could be read as a questioning of the president. However, if the entire intervention is reviewed, it rather exculpates her. In Sol it was interpreted more as a blunder than as an attack.
Ayuso continues to be one of the most influential politicians within the PP, there is no doubt about that. The question now is whether she will manage to bury the penthouse issue or if it will drag on until turning the last months of her third term into a rocky path. For her circle, the president suffers a political and media persecution over an issue that should already be settled. The Government has put it up for sale for 6.7 million in an auction that closes next week and believes that with that everything has been said. The new details that emerge only have, according to them, a partisan interest. “The next thing will be how many pens Planifica Madrid has and their cost in yen,” jokes someone very close to the leader. Sol has encountered a totally unexpected crisis, a mistake of their own that no one pushed them into, at a time when they could have benefited from attacks on Moncloa for their mistakes in managing Ceuta. However, the penthouse has Ayuso trapped in a loop, whether alone or with the entire PP behind her.
Read more The pressure from the PP complicates the transfer of 500 immigrant girls from Ceuta to the Peninsula
