Lockdown isn’t always a surefire vote winner. Just ask Madrileños

Agroup stands in the doorway of a newly opened sushi restaurant in downtown Malasaña chatting loudly as they smoke cigarettes, their masks resting on their chins, while waiting for space to open up within. In the plaza outside, a waiter frantically clears a table to seat a young couple who are perusing the menu via an app on their mobile phones. Further up the street, traffic has been diverted so that bars can place tables on the cobbles to cater for the crowds of Madrileños meeting their friends for an aperitivo in the warm spring sunshine.

This is Madrid, a city in the grip of a fourth wave where the Covid-19 infection rate consistently ranks as the highest across Spain’s regions but where, over the last six months, restrictions have been the most lax.

From the lamp-posts that line the streets and from giant billboards across the capital’s metro stations, is the smiling face of the woman who has made this state of semi-normality possible, the self-styled patron saint of the hospitality industry, Isabel Diaz Ayuso. On Tuesday, her gamble paid off, confounding the international political consensus that lockdowns are overwhelmingly popular with the public and securing a landslide win for her conservative Popular Party (PP).

Under a state of emergency imposed last October by socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, regional authorities were given the power under broad national guidelines to determine health policies and impose their own restrictions. Since then, Ayuso has steadfastly stuck to the belief that although Spain’s covid deaths are among the highest in Europe there was no need to kill the economy, too. While regions including Catalonia, Andalucia and the Balearic Islands shut down all non-essential businesses including shops, bars and restaurants, Madrid was determined to keep them open, defying Sanchez, health chiefs, and quite often common sense.

With Ayuso at the helm, for Madrileños the fun, though curbed, didn’t stop. On the evening that England went back into lockdown, I commiserated with my mother over the phone before rushing out to the opera, then joined friends for a glass of wine and tapas just in time to get home for the 11pm curfew (although admittedly that was an early night by Madrid standards).

Traumatised by the strictest lockdown in western Europe, when for six weeks Spaniards were confined to their homes, unable to go outside even to exercise as the coronavirus raged, Ayuso’s determination to keep things open won support even from those who wouldn’t traditionally buy into her Right-wing political ideology.

The well chosen word libertad (freedom) for her campaign slogan hit a chord and on Tuesday she increased her party’s share of the vote by 20 percentage points, doubling the number of seats in the regional assembly from the last election in 2019.

Although the PP still fell short of a majority and will need the support of the Right-wing Vox party to govern, this isn’t likely to prove a problem for Ayuso, a woman who started her political career tweeting on behalf of a predecessor’s dog. In a defiant response to Left-wing critics during campaigning in March, she said: “When they call you a fascist, you know you’re doing it right … and you’re on the right side of history.”