If the Madrid Assembly is the laboratory in which the PP and Vox alliance is experienced without the moderating factor of Cs, these are the first results. One: the Left’s amendments to the Budgets are rejected without even being read. Two: the PP studies the equality law sponsored by the extreme right, which includes a provision to repeal regional LGTBI laws. And three: the law promoted by Isabel Díaz Ayuso to neutralize the new state education law is analyzed on Wednesday in the Chamber without debating most of the opposition proposals, which ends up protesting and analyzing whether it can go to court.

Thus, the PP and Vox close a bilateral agreement before the presentation that works on the Master Law, to which they arrive convinced that the left only wants to delay the approval of a norm elaborated to short-circuit the application of the Celaá law. That is why the partners use their majority to change the working method on the fly: they defend closing the presentation without hearing most of the amendments because they have already read them before, they know that they will vote against, and they believe that a lot of time is being consumed in a a debate that they consider reduced to reading already known texts and condemned to disappear due to the weight of the majority of the two right-wing parties. And the one of San Quintín is armed.

“This goes beyond applying an unpresentable parliamentary steamroller,” complains Agustín Moreno, a Podemos deputy, describing “an attack on the right of the rest of the parliamentary groups, a denial of the debate.” Marta Bernardo, from the PSOE, results in his anger: “PP and Vox have not even left us the possibility of exposing our amendments.” And Antonio Sánchez, from Más Madrid, laments: “They said that they had the amendments before the session and they had read them. But Parliament does not work by reading, but by speaking, trying to convince the other. Without listening to the adversary, parliamentarism is de facto suppressed “.

Since 2019, PP and Cs have teamed up to co-govern four regions: Madrid, Murcia, Andalusia and Castilla y León. In the first three, Vox has been an indispensable element for the investiture of popular presidents, the approval of budgets, and governance. But many things have changed during the legislature.

In Andalusia the drums of electoral advance sound because the three partners no longer understand each other. In Murcia, the PSOE and Cs joined forces for a motion of censure that failed to dislodge the PP from power, where it remains thanks to four defectors who achieved their act with the oranges. And in Castilla y León the alliance has been strengthened thanks to the complicity between Alfonso Fernandez Mañueco (PP) and Francisco Igea (Cs).

However, the great earthquake has been experienced in Madrid. Here PP and Cs starred in a coexistence destined from the first day to divorce. Here Isabel Díaz Ayuso decided to advance the elections. And here, after the 4-M elections, PP and Vox only need each other, because Cs has disappeared from the Assembly. Consequently, Madrid is the main showcase of how the hypothetical alliances of the two right-wing parties that emerge after the 2022-2023 electoral cycle could work, where municipal power, most of the regional power, and the national power will be settled.

With the legitimacy and the backing of its stupendous result at the polls, the PP and Vox have combined to control Telemadrid, appointing as its provisional administrator the controversial José Antonio Sánchez (confessed voter of the conservative formation that appears in the Bárcenas Papers) , or agree on the Budgets.

They have also come together to veto the investigation into what happened in the residences during the first wave of the pandemic (thousands of people died). Or to promote a commission on the influence of the controls at the Barajas airport on the evolution of the disease in the region (one of Díaz Ayuso’s preferred fronts in the clash with the Pedro Sánchez government).

This Thursday, in all probability, the partners will join again to carry out the personal income tax reduction that the two promised to their voters in the campaign (it is processed in a single reading: without prior debate in committee or the possibility of the opposition presenting amendments), As on Thursday 16, they will join forces to end the region’s own rates (which represent 0.02% of the collection).

In the middle, PP and Vox have left samples of their commitment to take advantage of the majority that the polls have given them to speed up legislative times, narrowing the margin of action of a left that has fewer seats together than the PP alone. The excuse is that it is not convenient to rush the deadlines and spend a lot of time when the result is well known before the start of any procedure: the majority of rights will be imposed.

“Between saying that no amendment is going to be accepted, and not accepting any amendment, the result is the same,” said Alfonso Serrano, the PP spokesman, on account of the fact that the budget pact with Vox includes black on white that the signatories they will not support any improvement proposal from Más Madrid, PSOE and Podemos. A decision made with the registration period open, and therefore without reading the amendments, or assessing their content, or budgetary effect, much less debate them.

After six years of high tension for the PP, always pending that the Cs vote did not incline the debates in favor of the left, everything has changed in the Assembly. The PP and Vox are an unbreakable pairing. It is very difficult for Vox to vote on a key issue with PSOE, Más Madrid and Podemos. And the two parties are determined to take advantage of their majority to push forward as much of their political agenda as possible in an exceptionally short term: it started in June this year and ends in March 2023.

“The entire left has tried to obstruct and slow down the processing of the educational law,” justifies Lorena de las Heras, a PP deputy, what happened in Wednesday’s presentation. “They were looking for a ruse to delay the processing of the law: when the debate becomes a mere reading of amendments registered in October, which we have all read and worked on, there is an intention to run out of time,” he adds, recalling that the change on the march of the working method was adopted with a lawyer from the Chamber present, and therefore it was endorsed by him. And he concludes: “It is not true that they were prevented from explaining their amendments. They have not made adequate use of time for this, since in our first intervention the representatives of PP and Vox already announced our vote against the amendments. And instead of debating, they used that time to read the amendments, not to give their explanations ”.

Although Vox declined to participate in this information, parliamentary sources assure that its representative in the presentation, Jaime de Berenguer, tried to reach agreements with the left before the meeting on Wednesday, despite the fact that the PP considered unfeasible that the same parties that had supported the Celaá law in Congress (PSOE, Podemos and Más País, the national brand of Más Madrid) could contribute something in the Assembly to the regional norm with which it is intended to neutralize the state one.

The best-informed observers of the Chamber, in any case, attribute to the political calendar the rush of the PP to process its key electoral promises. Just reached the budget agreement with Vox, the two parties live a honeymoon that no one expects to last. In less than a month, 2022 starts. Pre-election year. And before the troubles between the two partners return, we must take advantage of the moment to move forward with the more things the better.

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