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Ayuso considers the PP’s race to return to La Moncloa underway
Isabel Díaz Ayuso is already speaking as though the campaign for the next general election had begun. After the autonomous cycle closed with the PP’s victory in Andalusia, the president of Madrid has asked her party not to relax and to work “every day” to regain central government. The message makes clear that Madrid will once again be one of the major political loudspeakers against Pedro Sánchez.
The meeting of the Madrid PP Regional Executive Committee served to set the tone and timetable. Ayuso congratulated Juanma Moreno on his result in Andalusia and presented that victory as proof that the PP can broaden its electoral base if it combines management, mobilisation and a message of change.
The Madrid president insisted that the party must not fall into euphoria. She recalled that at other times the PP believed La Moncloa was within reach and the result did not come. She therefore advocated a long, steady campaign that takes nothing for granted, even if she interprets the latest elections as a sign of wear on the central government.
The message fits with Alberto Núñez Feijóo's strategy, who also reads the electoral cycle as a sign that part of the country is calling for political change. In Madrid, that idea translates into an almost permanent mobilisation of the party, with Puerta del Sol and Génova once again acting as stages for direct opposition to the Executive.
Ayuso also used her speech to celebrate the judicial decision that halts the designation of the Real Casa de Correos as a site of democratic memory. The central government had promoted that designation because of the building's role as the former Directorate-General of Security during the Franco regime, a decision that the Community of Madrid has opposed from the outset.
The president maintains that the regional government's headquarters should project an idea of future and unity, rather than be reduced to one specific episode in its history. The clash over the Real Casa de Correos has thus become another symbolic front between Moncloa and Sol, in a parliamentary term in which almost any institutional issue ends up being interpreted in national terms.
Madrid is once again entering a campaign atmosphere long before the polls officially open. Ayuso wants to keep her electorate activated, Feijóo seeks to capitalise on the regional momentum and the PP interprets Andalusia as one more piece of a larger narrative: that of a political change which, according to the party, has already begun to move.