Ayuso overshadows the PP's plan to demand an early election

Farce and license of the Castilian queen . A century after its premiere, this grotesque play by Ramón María del Valle-Inclán had a kind of remake at yesterday's conference of presidents in Barcelona, ​​starring Isabel Díaz Ayuso.

The Madrid president deviated from the script prepared by the PP leadership in the meetings leading up to the summit, in which it had been decided that all the PP leaders would attend together and insist on asking the Prime Minister to dissolve the Cortes and call for elections, as Alberto Núñez Feijóo has been demanding since the beginning of the term.

"I'm not an Ayusologist," the Andalusian president argues in a debate that made all the barons uncomfortable.

Although Ayuso, of course, also demanded that Pedro Sánchez include everything he's doing—such as the amnesty and what she called the "Catalan quota"—in an electoral manifesto and denounced the "institutional crisis never seen before in Spain," her snub regarding the use, with simultaneous translation, of official languages ​​other than Spanish overshadowed the agreed-upon strategy and monopolized the spotlight.

"It's a shame that in the end it's turning into the earpiece conference," was the conclusion of most of her colleagues, who tried to balance respect for the Madrid leader's attitude with the breach of institutionality that her gesture implied.

“I’m not an Ayusologist,” argued the President of Andalusia, Juanma Moreno, to avoid giving explanations for such an unusual attitude as getting up from the table because someone was speaking in Basque or Catalan, if it was the Lehendakari, Imanol Pradales, or President Salvador Illa, and, on the other hand, remaining seated if the speakers were his colleagues Alfonso Rueda, who began his intervention in Galician and then switched to Spanish, or Marga Prohens and Carlos Mazón, who greeted their counterparts using the variants of the Catalan language of their territories.

This "inconsistency," as described by Ángel Víctor Torres, the Minister of Territorial Policy, hovered over every press conference given by the PP regional presidents, who had to respond, in some cases with visible discomfort, to repeated questions about Ayuso's discourtesy.

The Balearic Islands' Prohens, the Murcian Fernando López Miras, and the Aragonese Jorge Azcón chose to blame the government for what happened, having tried to use the linguistic controversy—by allowing all official languages ​​to be used at the conference of presidents for the first time—as a "smokescreen" to hide the difficulties in the Moncloa Palace at a political moment that "demands" elections. "It's a mistake for the debate to revolve around that," they remarked in unison, seeing that languages ​​were becoming a "tool of political confrontation." "A shame."

From Genoa, they played down the argument—aggravated by Ayuso's clash with the Minister of Health, Mónica García, during the formal greeting—and congratulated themselves on having arrived in Barcelona with a roadmap agreed upon by all their regional leaders: "The important thing is that our presidents have gone to tell Pedro Sánchez that this is the end of the escape," they asserted.

However, despite the PP leadership's downplaying of Ayuso's diatribes, who skipped her turn, established according to the order of approval of the autonomy statutes, to be among the first to address the media at the end of what she herself called a "farce," the PP failed to clearly impose the intended message at a time when Feijóo is touring Spain to relaunch his popularity two days after the demonstration in Madrid: "Mafia or democracy."