MADRID — She is a conservative who campaigned on a slogan that got here down to at least one phrase: Freedom. She supplied herself as a champion of small enterprise and scoffed at nationwide coronavirus restrictions.
Her critics known as her a “Trumpista.” But Isabel Díaz Ayuso is now a rising drive in Spanish politics. Voters rewarded the right-wing chief of the Madrid area with a landslide victory on Tuesday after she defied the central authorities by maintaining the capital’s bars and retailers open all through a lot of the pandemic.
She instructed that her victory confirmed that pandemic fatigue and financial misery had left Spaniards unwilling to endure extra of the measures favored by the left-wing nationwide authorities led by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.
“Madrid is freedom — and they don’t understand our way of living,” she informed her supporters about her left-wing opponents who suffered a crushing loss in the vote.
Ms. Ayuso’s Popular Party greater than doubled its variety of seats in Madrid’s regional meeting, trouncing different events, together with Mr. Sánchez’s Socialists. Her celebration fell simply in need of an absolute majority however will maintain onto energy with assist from the far-right Vox celebration.
She is the most talked-about politician in Spain proper now. But with nationwide elections not deliberate for one more two years, analysts are divided over whether or not she might make the leap to the nationwide political stage, or would even need to.
Even so, Ms. Ayuso’s victory, might sign {that a} shift to the proper is underway extra broadly as the nation struggles to emerge from the ravages of the pandemic.
Ms. Ayuso, 42, caught to a easy and clear message that related with voters who’ve endured greater than a yr of pandemic, stated Lluís Orriols, a professor of politics at the Carlos III University in Madrid.
“Maintaining Madrid open and economically active was something visible to all, while demonstrating that lockdown measures really help keep people healthy is something harder to do,” Mr. Orriols stated.
Madrid was the epicenter of Spain’s pandemic in the spring of 2020, when its hospitals overflowed with Covid-19 sufferers. But after the central authorities lifted a nationwide state of emergency final June, Ms. Ayuso ensured that the metropolis was considered one of the most bustling in Europe, even when its Covid-19 an infection charge crept again up after Easter.
This week, Covid-19 sufferers are filling 44 % of the beds in Madrid’s intensive care items, which is about double the nationwide common.
Ms. Ayuso’s dealing with of the pandemic provoked tensions even inside her administration. After resigning final yr as the head of Madrid’s regional well being companies, Dr. Yolanda Fuentes, just lately attacked Ms. Ayuso’s marketing campaign slogan on Twitter.
“To understand that freedom means to do whatever you want during a pandemic, when intensive care units are above capacity and colleagues feel defeated, seems to me indecent, to say the least,” Dr. Fuentes stated.
Outside the headquarters of the Popular Party on Tuesday night, a crowd of supporters danced to the sound of a D.J. Several of them stated they have been celebrating Ms. Ayuso’s private victory, somewhat than that of her celebration and its nationwide chief, Pablo Casado.
“She’s totally a pop icon and a mass phenomenon,” Mariola Vicario, a 25-year-old pupil, stated of Ms. Ayuso. “I don’t consider Casado to have her strength.”
In phrases of dealing with the pandemic, Ms. Vicario stated that Ms. Ayuso “took measures when needed, but what she did not do is let people starve to death” by maintaining Madrid’s financial system shut down so long as that of different cities.
Madrid’s vote was a convincing defeat for left-wing events, however it additionally confirmed that Ms. Ayuso can hold conservative votes which may have gone to Vox.
Mr. Casado has sought to distance his celebration from Vox, notably final yr when he refused to again a thwarted try by Vox to oust Prime Minister Sánchez in a parliamentary vote of no confidence.
In distinction, Ms. Ayuso stated throughout her marketing campaign that the Popular Party differed on particular points from Vox, but additionally instructed that the two had sufficient frequent floor to work collectively in Madrid if wanted.
Even in the midst of the pandemic, turnout in Madrid reached a file 76 % on Tuesday, 12 share factors increased than in the 2019 vote. It was additionally considerably increased than most other elections just lately in Europe, the place voters have been reluctant to end up amid the well being considerations.
In her closing marketing campaign speech on May 2, which was a public vacation in Madrid that commemorates the metropolis’s combat towards the occupation of Napoleon’s troops, Ms. Ayuso made a thinly-veiled comparability between the 1808 resistance towards the French and her personal stance towards the central authorities throughout the pandemic.
Ms. Ayuso, who studied journalism, was a second-tier politician when Mr. Casado unexpectedly handpicked her in early 2019 to be his celebration’s lead candidate forward of an election in the Madrid area.
She then took cost of the capital area, which the Popular Party has run since 1996, however was compelled to control with the assist of a center-right celebration, Ciudadanos. Tensions between the companions mounted earlier this yr, and Ms. Ayuso known as a snap election.
On Tuesday, Ciudadanos failed to choose up sufficient votes to even maintain a single seat inside Madrid’s regional meeting — votes that possible benefited Ms. Ayuso’s celebration as a substitute.
The election ended the political profession of Pablo Iglesias, the founding father of the far-left Unidas Podemos celebration. He had unexpectedly deserted his put up as deputy prime minister of Spain to run in the Madrid regional election.
In a farewell deal with to his supporters, Mr. Iglesias stated he was sorry to witness “the impressive success of the Trumpist right that Ayuso represents.”
