The mayor avoids ruling on the abortion sentence in order to broaden his social base without scaring voters of Vox or Ciudadanos, who have totally opposite positions
The mayor of Madrid and candidate for the PP, José Luis Martínez Almeida, has met this Tuesday for the first time his campaign committeeand everything that the team wanted to come out of it is reduced to two things: that they have, they say, a good management balance sheet as a letter of introduction, but without going into too many details because they have been left for a future act; and that the PSOE candidate, Reyes Maroto, is something like the infiltrated of Pedro Sánchez to replicate the Government’s policies in the city of Madrid.
From the direction of genoa, as this newspaper reported, the territories have been asked to consider the next municipal and regional campaign as a plebiscite against the central government with the aim that the result will be favorable to the popular ones and serve as a red carpet for Alberto Núñez Feijóo for the year-end generals. The idea is that in the pre-campaign months, from now until April, the mayors and barons focus on local issues, and on campaign days they finish off the job with national issues. And to that is added the express request to ignore the Vox debates.
But in the case of the city of Madrid, there is a particular case. The regional leader, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, has managed to form her political strategy in an almost natural way and from the beginning around the confrontation permanent with Sánchez, which has given him a place among Vox voters and a good result according to the polls. But in the case of Almeida the drag of the vote is not so clear in the polls, which show a winning PP but in which the right-wing bloc does not seem to have such a clear majority over the left sum.
Almeida absorbs part of the citizens voteand it remains to be seen if everything after the crisis experienced by this party, but the final outcome is still not so evident after four years of coalition with the orange formation, in which Almeida has lived a transition from the pacts of the village from the pandemic to the national party spokesperson (during which he had to dedicate more time to the ups and downs in the relationship with the president of the regional government) or to the last stage in charge of the mayor’s office, where the relationship with vox It has become impossible and now his messages are focused on Sánchez. And for the latter, the President of the Government has made it very easy for join the anti-Sanchista wave that Ayuso proclaims and that led her to double her results in the 2021 regional elections.
The campaign spokesperson Borja Carabante, has contrasted precisely what he considers a “successful model” of the coalition against the policies of the Government of the nation. Only possible, as he has said, because Almeida “excludes and scares away” everything that comes from Moncloa and has not missed the opportunity to remember that Maroto is nothing more than the “ambassador” who intends to “export” Sánchez’s lines of action to the city of Madrid.
Beyond this, Almeida focuses his campaign on giving continuity to his management balance, without yet being able to give clear messages about what city idea has for the next four years apart from continuing to delve into compliance with the European air quality directive, which has been complied with for the first time in 2022, in “the remodeling of public space” or in taking initiatives to different neighborhoods, to whose promise they use “the 48 public facilities” that they have executed in the different districts throughout these four years, as reported by Carabante.
Abortion, “sterile controversy”
With the objective of taking the votes of “everything to the right of the PSOE”, in the words of the spokesman, the mayor has avoided speaking openly today about the Constitutional Court ruling on the law on abortion deadlines. Almeidawho has always been against the voluntary termination of pregnancy and return to the law of assumptions of 85, He has not wanted to enter into what he now considers “a sterile controversy”, according to Europa Press, and has chosen to avoid the “framework of the left”, betting on continuing to talk about “pro-life policies”. “There is a culture on the left of seeking confrontation in such a complicated matter and taking a position on one side,” the mayor explained in a statement to the media prior to the campaign committee meeting, in which he accused the left to eliminate “important procedures such as the three-day reflection period for women” or allow “minors to abort without parental consent”.
He balancing act of his words coincides with the anti-abortion measures that Vox has registered in Congress and with which it intends to pressure the PP to keep its electorate faithful and the clear commitment to the right to free abortion of Citizens, two antagonistic positions that have left the PP in a difficult situation if he wants to attract the vote of both parties.