The president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, despised this Wednesday the landing of Óscar López as general secretary of the PSOE of Madrid, replacing the resigned Juan Lobato. During a television interview, the conservative baroness ruled out that the minister would be a candidate in the 2027 regional elections, recalled his electoral defeat in the 2011 regional elections of Castilla y León, and accused him of being “an errand boy” for the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, with the mission, he has said, of doing the greatest possible damage to Madrid. This Thursday, López will present his candidacy for the general secretary of the PSOE of Madrid, endorsed by the party leadership, and without predicting that he will have a rival for the January vote and the February 2025 congress.
“Everyone knows that he is not a candidate,” Díaz Ayuso said about López during an interview in 13 TV. “It’s a disaster in everything,” he said. “It has been going from team to team. sends him [Sánchez] to scrap, to do damage,” he accused. “He is not going to be a candidate, not even a joke,” he bet. “They can be last,” he added, in reference to the fact that the PSOE has already lost the leadership of the left against Más Madrid, which has been ahead of the socialists in both the 2021 and 2023 elections. And he concluded: “[López] He already lost in Castilla y León resoundingly. He knows he’s here to do the dirty work. Wherever the PSOE asks it, it changes organizations. “He is an errand boy.”
López, who was Sánchez’s chief of staff before becoming a minister, arrives in Madrid to try to revitalize a federation that in the last decade has accumulated five general secretaries (Tomás Gómez, Sara Hernández, José Manuel Franco, Lobato and whoever is chosen now) , in addition to four managers. Also, six spokespersons in the Assembly (Gómez, Franco, Gabilondo, Hana Jalloul, Lobato, and now Jesús Celada). And three candidates for mayor of the capital (Antonio Miguel Carmona, Pepu Hernández and Reyes Maroto).
Official PSOE sources affirm that his assignment is double: to be general secretary in 2025, and a candidate for the regional presidency in 2027. However, few in the party take that last part for granted. There are almost three years left until the regional elections, and many things can change until then, maintains a source with stripes of the PSOE, always immersed in the search for a white blackbird that can compete with the PP of Madrid, without finishing finding it: between 1991 and 2023, only Ángel Gabilondo, in 2019, managed to win the elections against the conservatives.
Until the next appointment with the polls arrives, Díaz Ayuso, who currently enjoys an absolute majority, will maintain his line of total clash with the government of Spain (PSOE and Sumar). He left evidence of this again this Wednesday.
“He is trying to destroy everything in the Community of Madrid,” he accused the central Executive. “The unions, CCOO and UGT, are already preparing to burn the streets, especially in Madrid,” he maintained. “That’s why Mr. López, the minister, has been encouraged to do harm, not to be a candidate for anything.”
This is how Sánchez’s trusted man lands in Madrid: seeking hand-to-hand combat against Ayuso, providing him with the opportunity to directly confront a minister, and being downplayed without nuance by the regional president.