In Madrid, the bet of the conservative Isabel Diaz Ayuso to counter the far right

The president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Diaz Ayuso, in Alcorcon, May 23, 2023. JAVIER SORIANO / AFP

Of the twelve autonomous regions at stake in the local elections taking place on Sunday May 28 in Spain, only that of Madrid could see the far right retreat. Elsewhere, polls indicate that the Vox party could double its seats (Aragon, Asturias, Balearic Islands, Murcia) or enter (Canary Islands, Castile-La Mancha, Extremadura, Navarre, Rioja) in regional parliaments. Almost everywhere, it should sit as the third political force, ahead of Podemos and other variations of the radical left. Opposite to the political arc, the retreat of the left from the left could swing many regions to the right in elections seen as a test for the president of the Spanish government, the socialist Pedro Sanchez, before the legislative elections. of December.

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The People’s Party (PP, right) is the favorite in the ballot. But the support of the extreme right could be essential to him if he wants to steal from the left the regional governments of Valencia, Aragon, Castile or the Balearic Islands and keep that of Murcia. But Vox has already warned that he would demand, in exchange for his support for the PP, to enter into coalition governments, as in Castile and Leon in 2022.

In this panorama, the autonomous community of Madrid, governed since 2019 by the representative of an uninhibited neoliberal right, Isabel Diaz Ayuso (PP), is an exception. This 44-year-old woman could collect more than 47% of the vote, two points more than in the early elections of May 2021. And 25 points more than in 2019, when this journalist by training, who entered the PP at 27, burst onto the regional scene. This time, she made the bet to obtain the 69 seats of the absolute majority and thus to be able to do without the support of Vox, a party which she describes as “useless” and “incompetent”.

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Capturing the Latin American vote

In the capital region, this woman from a family of small entrepreneurs ruined by the 2008 crisis, who likes confrontation, even provocation, has managed to curb the leak of the votes of the disappointed PP to Vox. For this, she took the opposite view of the xenophobic accents of Vox. With each dubious declaration concerning immigration coming from the far-right party, she reproaches its representatives for “not having a heart” nor “Christian morality” or she reminds them that “delinquency has nothing to do with origin of people.

Faithful to the libertarian line with the neoconservative overtones of the current of the PP which has governed Madrid for twenty-eight years, she fights against the feminist movement or for privatizations in education and public health. Her main enemy is communism, which she sees everywhere.

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