Sergio García Reyes, psychiatrist and representative of the Communist Party in the Madrid Assembly between 1983 and 1987, goes to a demonstration with his daughter Mónica hanging from his shoulders, holding on to a horse.
The image tells a lot about who she is, where she comes from and where the leader of Más Madrid wants to go, a nemesis of the Madrid president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, and former spokesperson for the white health tide turned politician.
For this reason, last Sunday, when this anesthetist joined the demonstration that unites 200,000 people to defend public health in the Community of Madrid, she was in her element.
Decades after she took that photo of her with her father that she still has, she continues to apply the values her parents taught her through debates, conversations and discussions.
"The first manifestation, Leo Bassi said, is the baptism into belonging to a society, and I remember going on the shoulders of my father," says García (Madrid, 48 years old), who has forgotten what it was the reason for that mobilization.
"At home, politics has always been a great protagonist of family dinners, as it has been in my circle of friends," she continues about her roots.
“We discussed, for example, the 15-M movement, and whether or not it should be translated into a party.
I advocated that it reach the institutions ”, he adds about his beginnings in Podemos, the party in which he was a member before making the leap to the Más Madrid of Íñigo Errejón and Manuela Carmena.
"With the white tide I realized that my work depends on politics," he explains about why he entered his first electoral lists.
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He arrived at the Assembly in 2015 with very marked intellectual references.
The playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht.
The doctor Rudolf Virchow, who saw politics as a transcript of medicine applied on a large scale.
John Rawls, theorist of the veil of ignorance, rewritten by García as the veil of empathy, in reference to how much a society would change if those who articulate it did not take into account their own position in it.
Or Judith Butler, a feminist philosopher, whom she recently met, accompanied by her, she says, because of the nerves of someone who approaches an idol for the first time and knows that she is going to make him into someone of flesh and blood.
The coronavirus changed his life forever.
A deputy specialized in health, García had made a career out of her ease in explaining the complex with simplicity, or her ability to attract the spotlight by transmitting her proposals or her complaints, even reciting poetry in Parliament.
And in those the pandemic broke out.
And Díaz Ayuso met a deputy who was supervising her controversial management data by data, study by study, with knowledge and substance.
That catapulted García as spokesperson and candidate for Más Madrid in the 2021 elections. It was a success: her party, barely two years old at the time, advanced the PSOE as a benchmark for the left in the region and made her the leader of the opposition.
Since then, she has experienced continuous wear and tear, since her clashes with Díaz Ayuso are, at least, weekly.
She is a "doctor and a jerk", according to the communicator Federico Jiménez Losantos, who uses the acronym "jerk" to ridicule the "doctor and mother" with whom the leader of Más Madrid appeared before the voters two years ago.
She is the woman who gesticulated in the Assembly as if her hands were a gun, denounces the PP.
The same one that "embarrasses" the doctors speaking for them, assures Díaz Ayuso, who fully yes, fully also, reminds García that in 2021 he had to return 13,000 euros to the Chamber for having received, by mistake, his salary as a parliamentarian with exclusive dedication while he was on sick leave at the Hospital 12 de Octubre.
That it was García who noticed the ruling, and communicated it to Parliament, is the least of it.
The PP and Más Madrid are like oil and water, and both tend to hyperbole.
“García reminds me of Captain Beatty”, summarizes Pedro Muñoz Abrines, the spokesman for the conservatives in the Madrid Assembly, about one of the protagonists of
Fahrenheit 451
,
“whose function was to impose a concrete vision of society, avoid reading books, to curtail freedom of thought, even if he did so precisely by referring to certain works”, he continues.
“The similarity lies in not accepting nuances or discrepancies, and passing it off as ignorance.
And in that he uses the condition of his doctor (like the captain that of chief) to clothe his fallacies with authority ”.
García, mother of three children, does not like those acid descriptions, sometimes insulting, typical of a Parliament that lives from row to row.
But the shell of him has already been made.
Just as many times it is she who attacks, she has learned to protect herself from it.
Faced with moments of maximum pressure, she says that she defends hesitation, and fragility, because that is defending normality, and understanding what happens to the majority of people.
And she found a trick to control her nerves a long time ago: “Victorino”.
"Once I had a scare with a man in the operating room, and in the afternoon I had a meeting with Ayuso," she says about her work as an anesthesiologist.
“In the operating room there is much more fear than in politics, and much more stress.
That puts you in your place, ”she continues.
“That day I went to the nervous meeting.
And I thought: this is no more stressful than what happened to Victorino this morning in the operating room.
Politics is easier."
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