The Vox spokesperson in the Madrid Assembly, Rocío Monasterio, speaks during a plenary session in the Madrid Assembly. Fernando Sánchez (Europa Press)
It is the closest thing to a pulse that there is today in Madrid politics.
The PP needs Vox to approve eleven legislative projects in the four plenary sessions of the Madrid Assembly that remain before the 28-M elections.
Vox, hurt by the fiasco of the negotiations to carry out the 2023 Budgets, demands that this Thursday the process to repeal the regional Law on Gender Identity and Expression and Social Equality and Non-Discrimination (known as trans law)
begins
.
And although Rocío Monasterio, the regional leader of the extreme right, denies that there is blackmail, and that everything is related, the tension is maximum.
To begin with, the PP has refused to reveal the meaning of its vote in the repeal of the
trans law
(anything that is not supporting it will end the project) and has left the approval of its initiative to attract foreign assets to Madrid for another day.
She indicates that the conservatives of Isabel Díaz Ayuso consider that her pending projects are in danger.
“Vox's initiative to repeal the trans law, at this point, has no route.
Nothing can be repealed ”, explains a source who has the confidence of the regional president, whose team negotiates in the Assembly with Vox to carry out the projects already announced and not carried out.
"It is an initiative that is only noise, that does not reach anywhere."
It is a question of calendar, says the PP.
Although a first step can be taken this Thursday, if the two parties come together to vote in favor of working on the repeal of the norm, all the processing would remain: registration and voting of the amendments to all or part of the articles, for example .
In the Chamber they consider that it would be historic if there was time to complete the repeal before the dissolution of the Assembly, motivated by the elections.
But in politics anything is possible.
Especially if it suits who governs.
And that is why the PP is playing with the times and shrouding in a veil of mystery whether it will allow the Vox project to continue alive in the vote on Thursday.
The deputy of the Popular Party Pedro Muñoz Abrines. Rodrigo Jimenez (EFE)
“The position of the PP will be known in plenary.
And I am not going to say much more about it ”, Pedro Muñoz Abrines, the spokesman for the conservatives in the Assembly, said on Tuesday.
Some words that are not chosen lightly.
Parliamentary sources acknowledge that the PP is studying "all the options" in the vote.
And that includes keeping the possibility of repeal alive, even to leave the door open to a partial amendment of the text that Díaz Ayuso has been pursuing since 2019 (to eliminate from the law, for example, the reversal of the burden of proof, which requires defendant to prove his innocence).
"I am in favor of repealing the most pernicious aspects of this law," said the regional president herself last Wednesday.
A phrase accompanied before and after by criticism of Vox that reflects the bad moment that the relations of two parties are going through, which are at the same time parliamentary partners and electoral rivals, condemned both to understand each other in the Assembly and to compete at the polls.
A dynamic that inevitably produces tension, and that has worsened since the 2023 Budgets did not go ahead.
"We are not blackmailing," Monasterio said this Wednesday.
“What we believe is that the PP has to position itself ideologically, it has to tell us where it is, if it is on the side of Irene Montero and Pedro Sánchez and their trans law, or are they on the side of those who believe that children cannot be snatch away parents ”, he continued.
"They have to define where they are, it cannot be that they have moved us to the center left," he insisted.
The tax bonus to attract foreign wealth now depends on the understanding between the two parties;
two other tax measures;
the Circular Economy law;
that of Cultural Heritage;
the Rights, Guarantees and Comprehensive Protection of Children and Adolescents;
the creation of the Official College of Tourism Professionals;
that of the book, reading and bibliographic heritage;
the creation of the Integrated System of Civil Protection and Emergencies;
Archives and Documents;
and the Management and Coordination of Urban Transport of the Community of Madrid.
With that, in perspective, Vox is looking to tickle the PP, since the proximity of the polls for the regional and municipal elections on May 28 require that the two parties differentiate themselves.
And that can turn the last four plenary sessions of the legislature into a crossroads for the conservatives: either they give up partial victories to Vox, or they risk Ayuso reaching the elections with several unfulfilled promises.
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