The Government will lift the punishment that hangs over Madrid. The glass will go from being half empty to being half full and the capital and its community will no longer be on their knees against the wall. After two weeks of penance, politicians dressed as scientists have raised their thumbs after cheating on the solitaire, the same ones that these same politicians dressed as scientists did the past few weeks. Following the policy of maximum opacity announced by the President, with heterogeneous and subjective criteria for the entire country and of course not available to anyone, Madrid has finally managed to pass Phase 0.5 – which did not exist when the different phases were regulated – to Phase 1.
As always throughout its history, Madrid continues sleeping on the edge of the hole and the sword, as a peasant named Miguel Hernández wrote. Now, with too many corpses behind him, he has become a large field of masks on which a president who seems to always look crooked, and who has punished the capital for being impertinent and responsive, and an attractant, screaming president, settle their concerns and virginal that tries to hide its apartments and its dead, the symbolic ones and the others, facing the mills.
And in this minefield, the Moncloa tenant seems determined to tell everyone that evil lives in Madrid and goes hand in hand with the little triplet; and the tenant of the Puerta del Sol, clad in Santa María de la Cabeza, sends her lead soldiers to rise up against the ‘social communist’ tyrant. And so both hold high the spirit of their pacts of government and fatten their egos at the expense of the enemies they treasure and an antagonism that is, in itself, more deadly than the virus that haunts us relentlessly. How tired. Again the two Spains trying to capitalize on this polarization that has been chasing us long before we were born. I read a journalist friend on Twitter: “There is a lot of talk about the two Spains, but there are three: one, the other, and those who look with amazement on both sides.”
Those of us in amazement now look at Madrid and see each other immersed in this phase. Or what is the same, we see politicians disguised as scientists dividing the passage from one phase to another. The lack of objective criteria makes everything possible or impossible depending on vested interests. And Pedro Sánchez has many interests and few deputies. And everything has a price, and if I support you to extend the Alarm State, you will pass me Phase, right? And if we are from the same party, we are not going to step on the hose right?
That of Madrid was not so much an injustice as a comparative grievance. Ministry and Community have mixed arguments and manipulations with equal parts. Some experts point out that it was not without logic to keep Madrid in Phase O, but for criteria that were not those argued by the central government. For experts, Madrid’s location in the center of the peninsula, its interrelation with the rest of the territory and being the main gateway to the country made it especially vulnerable. They could even have highlighted, without being mistaken, a certain deficit in primary care and a lack of human resources, as even the Madrid Medical Association has denounced.
But the rejection came for other reasons. Issues that were secondary in other communities not governed by the Popular Party in Madrid were decisive. In the exchange of missives between Health and the Community it became clear that the importance of population density depends a lot on the interests of the Executive. To argue that the 5419 inhabitants per square kilometer of Madrid could favor “a high rate of contact between people, with the consequent probability of transmission” sounds like a joke in times of few jokes when we found that Cádiz (9597), Bilbao (8295), Pamplona (7851), A Coruña (6452) and Valencia (5850), with a higher density, are already in Phase 1. The comparative grievance was evident.
And it was again when Health spoke of the Accumulated Incidence (AI) of the Community of Madrid. Illa’s team argued that the AI of the last 14 days – from the end of April to May 13 – was 39.75 per 100,000 inhabitants, much higher than that of the whole of Spain. But he forgot to explain why they decided to go to Phase 1, in the first round, to Navarra, La Rioja and the Basque Country when they had an AI of 64, 63 and 40, respectively, well above the national average and the one with Madrid.
That the data is there for politicians dressed as scientists to play with is also evident when the ministry talked about AI throughout the entire pandemic. They punished Madrid for doubling the national average but they forget that La Rioja almost tripled it, that the Basque Country, Navarra and Castilla-La Mancha, approved with data well above the national average and that much of the territories of Castilla y León and Catalonia passed to Phase 1 with data was also well above the average. The reason for the igo punishment ’was always in the famous article 33.
Madrid continues to come very big to the socialists. They lost the City Council 31 years ago and the Community 25 years ago and since then they have remained fallen in the hole and without a sword and their wandering through both institutions has been testimonial, except when the ‘Tamayazo’ prevented Rafael Simancas from ruling. And if they were unable to reconquer either Cibeles or Puerta del Sol last year, when the corruption of the popular people flooded all corners of Madrid and its surroundings, the problem is that citizens do not trust Calle Ferraz.
Pedro Sánchez, who was a councilor in the capital with Trinidad Jiménez, does not care too much that his disdain for Madrid is noticed. His league is another and if he has not cared to agree first and then betray, in just 24 hours, PNV, Ciudadanos and Bildu, it will not matter what a community thinks that does not have him as his favorite son. If even Casado beat him in the capital in the general passes.
Simancas launched a tweet this Wednesday in which he asked: “Are there really public officials capable of putting the health and lives of our families at risk by pure partisan calculation?” What a scare! For a second, just for a second, and having seen what was seen with the ‘buying and selling’ of the phases of de-escalation, I thought he was referring to his boss.
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