With yesterday’s avalanche victory in her Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso rises to the rank of “Liberal alternative” on the menus of the European anti-virus policy. The governor of the Comunidad of the Spanish capital, the equivalent of our region, has earned the role with a resounding no to health closures imposed by the Spanish central government. You of the popular right (PP), the premier Pedro Sánchez of the center-left (PSOE) engaged in a duel that immediately turned into symbolic-political challenge, no longer on health reasons, on the sense of closing production activities, distancing people, limiting the circulation of the virus, but on ideological motivations of those choices. In his way of communicating, Ayuso translated the closure of a bar as state interference in private property. Social distancing as an attack on individual freedom. The electoral campaign that allowed Governor Ayuso to double votes and seats, the fight against Covid has become the challenge between “communism and freedom”.
After the first pandemic wave of spring 2020 in which she too, like everyone else, was caught unprepared by the virus, on the eve of the second wave, in October, Ayuso had devised a strategy unlike anyone else in the world. With all of Europe following the lockdown logic, you have raised the bar: hold open you can; if it has to close, it has to be closed for individual neighborhoods; the number of infected and hospitalized patients is not to be measured as a percentage of the population, but by the ability of hospitals to assist; the curfew is punitive, depressing, 11pm (not 10pm as in the rest of Spain) is the most acceptable compromise because it allows for sociability, the work of restaurateurs and does not lead to breaking the rules.
The ascending parable of Ayuso has a starting date: October 2020. The numbers of Coronavirus infections were rising in Madrid as in all of Europe. The Sánchez government was drafting a decree to impose a “state of alarm” on the entire country and therefore exceptional isolation measures it deemed necessary. From her office as regional governor in Puerta del Sol, Ayuso phoned Moncloa, the seat of the national government and said ‘no’. “Here in Madrid, in my Comunidad, it is not necessary, it will be a tremendous damage to the image of the city. We are the economic heart of the country, we cannot say at the international level that we are on “alarm” when it is not necessary. I don’t close “.
The government “commissioned” her for two weeks, but then she took the lead. With a unique system in the world for monitoring the presence of Sars-CoV-2 in sewage waters claimed to be able to identify the most infected neighborhoods a few days in advance and therefore be able to reduce mobility only in those. The result is in a unique winter in Europe with a high number of infected, but with economic activities still functioning. In 2020 Madrid did better than the rest of the country for one percent of its GDP, but worse for the number of deaths (+ 35% compared to the national average). For 44.72 percent of the people from Madrid who voted for it yesterday, it was the right choice.
May 5, 2021 (change May 5, 2021 | 12:17)
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