The deputy mayor of the capital, Begoña Villacís, inaugurates the new Mercamadrid Employment Agency office.KIKE PARA
-They are liars.
You can not play like this.
One wants to think that the word of the people continues to matter, that it is honest, but in politics you find that people act disloyally.
Begoña Villacis speaks almost in a state of
shock.
He has just learned that Alfonso Fernández Mañueco has dissolved the coalition government of PP and CS in Castilla y León to call early elections on February 13. The blow for the orange party is tremendous. Immersed in an endless crisis since 2019, the loss of that Executive is added to that of Murcia and that of which Cs shared with Isabel Díaz Ayuso in the Community of Madrid. Since then, Villacís has acted as the party's emergency architect in the region: visible head of a project full of cracks, the deputy mayor of the capital must prop up a building that threatens to collapse, while living in the City Hall with José Luis Martínez-Almeida (PP ). A politician who is at the same time his government partner; his electoral rival for 2023; and the number three of the match that has just broken the pact with Cs in Castilla y León. Almost nothing.
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“The greatest difficulty I have encountered has been healing the wounds of the 4-M regional elections, the situation of frustration [because Cs went from being in the Government to being left without representation in the Assembly], going through the mourning and reillusion to the people, but the team is already plugged in again, ”says Villacís, who in her last interview with EL PAÍS left open the possibility of not being a candidate in the next elections. "The advancement of elections in Castilla y León has been good for us in that sense, because it is so unfair, the impudence [of the PP] is so great, that we are once again hearing things like the ones that motivated our entry into politics in 2015," he adds. "The PP has dared to do that because it knows that we are not going to do the same in Madrid,that I cannot pay with the people of Madrid for what they have done to us in Castilla y León”, he continues on the health of the municipal coalition. “Between 2023, the key is going to be knowing how to explain everything we have done in the City Council, and being able to attribute it to ourselves, which is fair, because there has to be a distribution of merit in a coalition government.”
The buttresses of the project with which Villacís tries to rebuild Cs after the departure of Ignacio Aguado are not only made of capital policies.
They also settle for risky municipal bets defended with the argument of stopping Podemos.
Despite the fact that Villacís governs the capital with the PP, Cs has entered the PSOE governments of Alcalá de Henares and Leganés, and has achieved the mayor's office of Alcobendas also in coalition with the Socialists.
The concrete of the work is being laid by a new regional committee, with which the leader tries to put out the internal fires, and stop the PP's attempts to attract mayors and organic positions towards the conservative formation.
The mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, in an act on January 4.
ISABEL INFANTS (Europa Press)
And the vault key of the reconstruction is in the City Hall of the capital, where the deputy mayor stars in the last great media focus of CS in the region while living with Martínez-Almeida. To begin with, Villacís has taken over the municipal news during the days that the mayor has discounted confined after falling ill with covid. Thus, one day it gives the ears of the hoteliers by announcing that the permits of the open provisional terraces are extended to keep businesses afloat during the pandemic. The next comes the turn of the entrepreneurs, because Villacís says that the City Council guarantees to SMEs and the self-employed already exceed 160 million euros. And the municipal and regional elections of 2023 are always present, which are already on the horizon, so we must press the accelerator. ”I am to govern Madrid,not to the next step”, she specifies.
"But it doesn't matter," laments a source with a long history in the party and who knows all its ins and outs. “In Madrid, if you don't roll national Cs, it's very screwed up for the party. It doesn't have a hole," he explains. “Not having representation in the Assembly makes it very difficult to do politics. If you are not here, people forget about you... And precisely what is missing is a reference point that speaks every day about regional news”, he exemplifies. "Begoña does it from time to time, hers is to be admired, but if the rest of the game is for grapes, it doesn't matter," she says. "And because of all these things, especially the lack of national pull, it is increasingly difficult for Cs to make a dent in the media, and we are drowning, drowning and drowning," he points out. “On top of that, it harms the electoral dynamics.”
It all starts in the repetition of the 2019 general elections: the blow is such that Albert Rivera resigns.
Then came the bad results in the Basque and Galician elections (without representation) as well as the Catalan ones (it went from 36 to 6 deputies in the cradle of the formation).
The auction is to lose the governments of Murcia, Madrid and Castilla y León, and now face two elections that could leave the party without representation, or with less than it had: Castilla y León and Andalucía.
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"Begoña is trying to use Madrid to revive CS: Madrid is the most important nucleus that the party has left, and she is its image," recalls Juan Carlos Bermejo, a historical internal opponent of Rivera's national leadership and Aguado's regional leadership. , a sort of jiminy cricket that has found a complete change of scenery in the Villacís stage. “I am seeing things that I never would have thought to see, undoubtedly the work of Begoña, like a cohesive regional committee that speaks to me, when before nobody spoke to me”, he is surprised. "The main problem he has is that most of the institutional positions are people placed by the previous team: there is a loyalty problem that he has to deal with."
Villacís and the party deny the majority. They reduce to personal or anecdotal matters that a mayor of Cs allowed a change of government in El Escorial, or that another supported in their social networks the criticism of the current national leadership of Fran Hervías, former secretary of the orange organization, today in the PP.
The leader is something else. Less than a year ago, Cs was in the Community Government, and he took it for granted that in 2023 he would have at least 15% of the votes, and would choose to remain in both the regional and municipal governments. The scenario is now radically different. The 4-M served for Díaz Ayuso to absorb the party's votes at the regional level through deeds, and for the PP to send a clear message to the voters of Cs: that historical figures of the orange party such as Toni Cantó, Marta Rivera de la Cruz or Marta Marbán now work for the conservative leader is an invitation for the citizens who supported Rivera to follow them. Consequently, Villacís knows that in Madrid the survival of Cs and his own as politics is at stake.
"The situation is very difficult and very different from how the mandate began," he acknowledges.
"Coalitions penalize the party they support, but Madrid gives more visibility, we have achieved a certain prominence, being valued for our policies and our loyalty [to Martinez-Almeida]," says the deputy mayor, who attributes to Cs the launch of Madrid Nuevo Norte, the high execution of the Budgets, an improvement in the transparency of the consistory, or the commitment to facilitate the installation of terraces.
“By 2023 we have to manage very well, unblock Madrid, improve the lives of citizens by unblocking access to housing, and be able to explain why a government with Citizens is different.”
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