-Freedom for what and for whom? Whoever wants to read and understand what I am saying understand it.
It is impossible to talk about Isabel Diaz Ayuso without the word “freedom” ever centering the conversation. “Enric González said something like what we must focus on now is to resolve that there are those who have to buy everything and those who have for nothing. That is the great hole of freedom,” reflects the journalist Alicia Gutiérrez (infolibre), author of Because I feel like it: Ayuso, the new leader (Akal Publisher). Thus, “one of the most important characters” of Spanish politics hides in the hole of freedom. Condition that led Gutiérrez to consider it deserving of a book that is nothing more than a macro-report of more than two hundred pages.
In it, the informant covers her biography and her political rise —she says of Ayuso that “she seems to have surpassed the teacher Aguirre”—, but above all she addresses what she calls the “programmed political obsolescence” that “erasure” has achieved. of his “background”. That is to say, that nothing (or few things), no matter how serious they may be, take a political toll on him, explains Gutiérrez in his conversation with Public in a bar in the center of the capital. It could not be otherwise.
Can you understand Ayuso without the bars? “Madrid cannot be understood without the bars,” Gutiérrez settles after a prolonged silence. He has thought about it because behind it came the explanation: “In Madrid, apart from the tourist weight, the associative fabric was fraying, the people who were in the late Franco regime and then in the Transition tell you. That fabric has been crumbling. The nexus is now in the bars”. Ayuso “has known how to see it,” he admits, just as “he has managed to hide the fact that you cannot be in a pandemic like the one we have been in and that a bar or twenty does not matter to you.”
The journalist, who is behind some of the investigations that have put Ayuso and his Government on the ropes the most, covers in her book all the scandals that define her. Somehow, she compiles all the news that she has managed to hide. As? “What do you want me to tell you? What does a formidable media apparatus have? Is that what you want me to tell you? I’m not going to tell you because everyone can reach the conclusion they want, you just have to observe. Does it have Did it make sense that the big media have let the residences go unnoticed?
If Gutiérrez’s book achieves something —of incalculable journalistic value— it is not letting anything go. He further warns the left of the risk of “devaluing” it and reducing its loaded statements to “helped“. “She is endowed with a charisma uselessly discussed and beaten by those who define her as a puppet of Miguel Ángel Rodríguez”, she writes on the first pages.
-Is there a sexist deal with Ayuso?
-Deliberate machismo no, but it will take several generations for it to disappear completely. To those who speak of Ayuso as a “go”, a puppet of Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, I have not really heard them say that from any man. Of course they are wrong because, obviously, they are also giving the president a boomerang, who allows herself to make absolutely sexist comments.
