Overwhelmingly wins the People’s Party (PP) in the regional elections in Madrid, Spain, which allow the outgoing governor Isabel Diaz Ayuso to lead the administration alone. In fact, the Pp won 65 of the 136 seats in the regional Parliament, as announced by the Electoral Commission with 99.93 percent of the votes scrutinized. It is almost double the results achieved by the party in 2019, when it won 30 seats.
But how was Ayuso’s triumph built? On an anti-lockdown approach to the Covid pandemic. Rising star in the People’s Party, Isabel Diaz Ayusowas a major criticism of Prime Minister Sanchez’s government and its handling of the pandemic. At the helm of the richest region in Spain, Ayuso always wanted to strongly defend the local economy: Madrid is the only major European capital that has had bars, restaurants and theaters open since June 2020; and in the months of the pandemic, he led the front of the regions that challenged the hard line on closures wanted by the government. A lesson that could also be replicated by the right-wingers of other European countries, including Italy by Matteo Salvini and Giorgia Meloni.
No hotbeds in Madrid with bars, restaurants and theaters open
A strategy, highly criticized by Moncloa, which however did not lead to the feared explosion of Covid outbreaks: with a curfew set first at 9pm and then moved to 11pm, Madrid is the Spanish region with fewer restrictions but the accumulated incidence has long since stopped to be the highest in the country and the number of new cases and deaths is far from the peak in January. The success of Ayuso, which confirms its growing popularity, even obscures that of the leader of the PP, Pablo Casado, and leads it to look to Moncloa, to oust Sanchez in the next national elections.