It does not matter that the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, is absent from the plenary session of the Assembly due to a trip to the European PP congress in Bucharest (Romania). Also without her, the regional Parliament is filled this Thursday morning with shouts, fusses, gestures and crossed offenses when the Minister of Family, Youth and Social Affairs, Ana Dávila, faces a question regarding the residences, where 7,291 people died during the worst of the pandemic. Emilio Delgado, from Más Madrid, questions her. And sparks fly, because the counselor accuses former vice president Pablo Iglesias of having left these centers abandoned, despite the fact that even the Madrid Executive recognized at the time that the competition was autonomous, and also Yolanda Díaz, then Minister of Labor and Economy Social. The turmoil is so big that the president of the Chamber, Enrique Ossorio (PP), breaks out and goes once morest the Más Madrid bench, accusing it of interrupting the intervener. As if they were the only ones in the cricket cage of the chamber.
-When a deputy speaks, the rest of the deputies remain silent! Shut up! You are impossible! “You are impossible,” Ossorio repeats, a rarity in a politician with exquisite forms and natural content.
―They live in a parallel world. Let the counselor speak! Don’t interrupt! If you don’t have arguments, then shut up! You shout because you have no arguments, it can’t be! Silence, please!-.
Dávila then continues his speech with a loud hum in the background, just as a vacationer is constantly accompanied by the noise of the waves on the beach, because what is heard stirs up some of the Más Madrid deputies, restless in their seats, from where They gesture, protest and tap their feet.
“He has attributed responsibility for the management of the residences to us, when it was obviously from the Community of Madrid,” Delgado asks to speak, scandalized by what he has heard.
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-Is a lie. “It’s a false statement,” he insists, without Ossorio letting him speak, so he is called to order twice, as is later his fellow soldier, Pablo Padilla. Both, therefore, are threatened with expulsion.
―The only expression is that you are impossible. Impossible―, closes Ossorio while part of the Más Madrid deputies begin to leave the plenary session and their leader, Manuela Bergerot, looks back as if trying to hold the bulk of the group to their seats, preventing the generalized rout. A gesture that is of no use.
“You guys are rude!” “Some rude people!”, the next PP speaker tells the deputies of Más Madrid, indignant, and ready to underline her anger by turning off the microphone like someone participating in a heavyweight boxing match. “I repeat it once more, rude people.”
The scuffle once once more demonstrates that there is no issue that upsets Ayuso’s PP more than its management of residences in the pandemic. Although the party argues that the absolute majority achieved in May 2023 validates everything done, the reality is that the ghost of controversy haunts it once more and once more. Because more than 7,000 residents died in the worst of the pandemic as a result of triage protocols that prevented their transfer to hospitals. This veto was most intense between March 9 and April 5, 2020 and especially significant between March 16 and 29. As hospitals freed up beds, geriatricians stopped acting as filters and sick residents were readmitted, although this situation varied from one hospital to another. And that wound never closes.
That is why there are days when Ayuso, with a changed face, leaves headlines regarding it: “They are one step away from accusing us of genocide”; the elderly “were not saved anywhere”; or they died “as much or more in hospitals.” Days in which the PP tries to silence the representatives of the deceased elderly when they are invited to speak in the Chamber. And mornings like this Thursday, in which the plenary session is filled with shouts to silence the controversy in the residences. But not only.
Because soon, in a debate regarding the decorations of the Community of Madrid, clashes break out once more, and Hugo Martínez Abarca, from Más Madrid, ends up expelled from the plenary session for asking from his seat for Ossorio to resign.
The president of the Madrid Assembly has fired me because he has not tolerated me asking him to resign.
What would the PP say if Armengol did with the deputies who ask for his resignation what Ossorio has done with me today?
After all morning listening to insults, atrocities and lies… pic.twitter.com/qpKI6ywNf7
— Hugo Martínez Abarca (@hugomabarca) March 7, 2024
“He has been expelled from the House due to the House Speaker’s incapacity, bias and attempt to muzzle the opposition,” protests Bergerot, the opposition leader. “They are very bad used to it,” she warns. “They think they can insult us, and that we are going to be silent. They are not going to silence us regarding the residences or corruption. Never”.
This is how Ossorio answers him, in open contradiction with his previous words: “They are not asked to be silent, they are asked to be polite, respecting parliamentary courtesy.” With Ayuso absent, the Madrid deputies continue fighting until their day ends.
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