Lobato finishes off a broken PSOE in Madrid | Madrid News

When this Wednesday, after two-thirty in the afternoon, Juan Lobato announced his resignation, few were those who loudly showed any support. Those who thought he would resign in his message on Tuesday only had to wait one day to find a response to the clamor: Lobato is a political corpse who would not even be well received in the Congress that the PSOE will hold this weekend. “You have to be flat to appear in Seville,” a Madrid mayor told this newspaper hours before learning of her resignation.

“He doesn’t respond to messages or answer calls. “He is absent,” explained this mayor, at the head of one of the 32 town councils in the hands of the PSOE of the 179 that the Community of Madrid has. Another mayor close to Lobato, however, denied that version. “Anyone who knows him knows that he is connected all day long,” he said. This councilor, one of the few who dared to speak well of Lobato (although without giving his name) acknowledged having spoken with him in the hours prior to his resignation and that he found him “doing well in such a difficult situation.” The mayor thus confirmed that Lobato had stopped listening to the voices that, since Monday morning, had asked him for explanations for having taken his conversations with a person from Moncloa to a notary, who asked him to air the proposal of Ayuso’s lawyer. to the prosecution, as revealed Abc.

When consulted five mayors of the Community and two other senior socialist officials who preferred not to give their names, practically all of them considered Lobato’s situation “unsustainable.” The majority were “stunned” by what they considered a “betrayal” with the sole objective “of saving himself,” they acknowledged in reference to the existing judicial investigation into the leak of the case of Ayuso’s boyfriend.

For Lobato, however, they had already looked for a replacement. Everything indicates that Óscar López, current Minister of Digital Transformation and one of the men closest to Pedro Sánchez, is the man chosen by Ferraz to replace a Lobato who never enjoyed the affection of the apparatus. For some of those consulted, with his “unilateral” decision he exhausted the “little support” he had left among the bases.

A Treasury Technician by training, Juan Lobato became mayor of his town, Soto del Real, at the age of 29, where he achieved two absolute majorities. In 2021, he won his party’s primaries by obtaining 61% of the vote. Even his critics acknowledge that he has a good knowledge of the cities and towns of Madrid, but they reproach him for a “lack of fang” and a “not very forceful commitment to the left.” His measured tone, not very suitable for the current times, alienated him from large sectors of the party and his veiled criticism of some of the Government’s agreements with the Catalan independentists ended up alienating him more and more from Moncloa, to which is added a meager result. electoral that was opening an abyss for which there was already a replacement.

When Lobato was asked about it a week ago, and he still aspired to fight the battle, he used irony to refer to Óscar López or Francisco Martín, the names that were on the table: “If you said that Michelle Obama wants to take charge of the PSOE of Madrid wants to inaugurate groups and tour the towns, I would reconsider it, if there was a great alternative capable of generating a social illusion and it was worth giving up the work of thousands of militants… but Michelle Obama is not in this, so there is “We have to respect people.”

Under the Lobato Government, in the last elections, the PSOE-M managed to add three seats to the meager numbers with which it arrived at the 2023 elections, but it remained the third party, 6,000 votes behind Más Madrid, very meager data for the third region that contributes the most seats to Congress after Andalusia and Catalonia. One of the few voices that continued to support him points out that “Juan did the right thing by going to a notary office” and defends that “the militancy does not want Ferraz to show us the way. “There are different voices here.” However, the heavyweights of the party, such as Javier Ayala, mayor of Fuenlabrada, or Sara Hernández, mayor of Getafe, had long since given up their thumbs.

Just a week ago, when he talked about Michelle Obama, he felt strong and eager to fight in December. The main argument was the need to establish leadership after years without direction, but everything changed after the information that revealed that months ago he went to a notary office to record the messages he exchanged with Pilar Sánchez Acera, chief of staff of Óscar López . Sánchez Acera is precisely a capital figure in Madrid to understand how the relations between Madrid socialism and the Government of Pedro Sánchez are brewing. Óscar López’s chief of staff, Sánchez Acera, who never knew that Lobato, her former boss, took the WhatsApp conversation she had with him to a notary until he published it Abc, He has been in Madrid politics for more than 25 years. She was a councilor of Alcobendas between 1999 and 2007, from where she became a trusted person of the then party leader, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, who even placed her as an alternative to Tomás Gómez in the 2012 primaries. “I don’t have a bad opinion of She is a party colleague with whom I have worked closely for a long time,” said this mayor close to Lobato. That relationship, obviously, blew up.

Once again, with the party broken, the PSOE-M will face its primaries in a few days. Candidates will be received from December 5, between December 8 and 16 the endorsements will be collected, on January 11, the first vote and, on January 18, a second if necessary. Lobato leaves through the back door, like Tomás Gómez, dismissed in 2015, which continues to pay for the erratic course that the party has taken in the last 30 years, in which it has had six general secretaries, three managers and almost as many candidates as elections.