When I was still a teenager who loved football and books, I went to the bookstores (there were two) in my town, Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife, to buy Dicen and Lean, which were Catalan sports newspapers in which I could read ups and downs of Barça, which was soon my favorite team. There I discovered Martín Girard, which was the pseudonym with which Gonzalo Suárez hid his true identity to write about such Barça ups and downs. Among the sections that he signed like this in El Dicen there was one in which he recounted his walks through the fields of Spain (and abroad) and entitled The soles of my shoes. Years later, my passion for Martin Girard was the same passion for Gonzalo Suárez, novelist, filmmaker, a brilliant man whose literature I edited and whose family I am devoted to, just like him, naturally, who is perhaps the most brilliant man I know. For all these reasons, and because I want to pay homage to his genius as a writer, as of today my already old Street Witness section is renamed after his; Naturally, what I write here is pale next to the joys he gave me reading him when he was an amazed boy in the Plaza del Charco.
And I start with this stolen title talking about what happens in Madrid, a beautiful community where my grandson also lives. What happens seems, once again, the script of a film made to intrigue or to laugh, since it is the chronicle of some young politicians who in recent years have fought to topple Pedro Sánchez and in a couple of hours they have destroyed themselves. The future that awaits Pablo Casado and Isabel Díaz Ayuso (president of the PP, president of the Community of Madrid) at this moment resembles their fight: a sullen, difficult future, marked by a specific event in which they will inevitably have to do judges, as if it were an inevitable divorce of two irreconcilable people. The matter is serious, since it clearly shows the worst of politics, the temptation of corruption into which the president of Madrid seems to have fallen, clearly benefiting her brother with contracts that have given him what was formerly called fat profits.
President Casado seems to have warned his partner Ayuso in the autumn that these things are not done, and if they are, they are explained. She didn’t feel like offering those explanations, and her boss seems to have allowed vigilante investigations to start around her to find out what the hell was going on. Political ambition intersected in the middle, which in both is like a whirlwind of passions; She wanted to become president of the party in Madrid and for this she considered it opportune to overshadow senior officials of Casado’s team, to the point that she decided to block one of the most conspicuous conspirators in the kingdom, and from the PP, Teodoro García Egea, on her phone. Now the duo is a trio, or a quartet, since Pablo, Isabel and Teodoro have been joined, as in a sticky game of thrones, by the illustrious Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, chief of staff of the president and doller who was from Aznar to Kick out Felipe González and Ayuso’s battering ram to dismantle Casado’s ambitions.
The mess is terrible, it has national resonances, and it is an example of how ambition breaks the sack where it is weakest or neglected. At the center of this unfortunate screen of errors is the brother of Díaz Ayuso, whose name is Tomás, benefited by her with some blushing favors, since it is about using the funds of the Community of Madrid to get commission money for having bought a good number of masks in China. He draws attention (to Casado, among others, since he has said so) that those purchases made under the protection of the sister president were made just when Spain was at the most dangerous (and painful) point of the pandemic. The gibberish confuses the money obtained, which ranges between 60,000 thousand euros, more or less, and 300,000, more or less as well. Ayuso has rightly felt persecuted, but what she has allowed must be investigated by the law. She has also felt like a political victim, since she aspired to be president of the PP in Madrid and for the moment her aspiration has been cut short. But it is that a person who has allowed these excesses has to somehow purge the carelessness of it.
Pablo Casado is not his saint of devotion, that is clear, and it is evident that there are other leaders or militants who do not hold him in high esteem either, but in this rogue of errors it is Isabel Díaz Ayuso who has made mistakes that can only be defended with a hard face or ignorance, because it is evident from all points of view that what she did to benefit her brother (whatever she says now about the administrative twists and turns that adorn the terrible management of the matter) is perhaps punishable by civil law or criminal, but above all it is penalized by common sense. Looking closely at this disaster that leads the PP to a refoundation or a mea culpa is a perverse example of what is done with politics when it is not accompanied by modesty. That smiling duo cannot be seen now, their common horizon is so cloudy.