MADRID, 13 Mar. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The president of the Community and of the PP of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, will dispense with the current Minister of Health, Enrique Ruiz Escudero, the next legislature and will appoint him a senator by regional designation after announcing that Paloma Tejero will be the PP candidate for Pozuelo de Alarcón .
After the ‘populares’ announced that the mayoress of the municipality, Susana Pérez Quislant, would not continue after the elections, it sounded more and more loudly that the square would be occupied by Escudero, the current party president in the town. The head of Health avoided publicly positioning himself and sources around him pointed out that he preferred to continue in his position or another exit.
From the PP of Madrid, the mystery of the candidacy of one of its main strongholds in the region was revealed at first of this Monday. It will be Paloma Tejero, the current Deputy Minister for the Environment and Agriculture, who was a councilor between 2015 and 2019. She is a ‘new face’, who never entered the pools for the position.
The proposal for this appointment, along with the other 92 pending candidates, will be made by the PP Steering Committee that meets this Monday and will be ratified later by the Autonomous Electoral Committee.
In the same communication, the PP anticipated that Escudero would remain in the Government until the end of the legislature but, after finishing, he would leave a position that he has held since 2017. He will only be included in the electoral list for the Madrid Assembly and proposed as a senator by regional designation. It is a position that would allow him to continue qualified for possible legal cases derived from the pandemic.
The Madrid president removes from the first line one of the most relevant advisers within the Executive, who was as ‘number two’ on the electoral list in the last elections. With this designation, two years ago, the management he carried out during the pandemic was recognized, which was key to giving Ayuso a comfortable majority in 4M.
The challenge of Covid-19 elevated him within the Madrid government and increased his popularity among the people of Madrid, although he did not always have the best ‘feeling’ with the Madrid leader.
Regarding the internal battle of the PP, which pitted Ayuso against Casado and focused on his Ministry’s contracts with a company linked to the president’s brother, Escudero repeatedly publicly defended his legality and Ayuso’s honesty despite being also close to the former national directorate (from which irregularities were pointed out).
These last few months at the head of the Ministry of Health have not been easy for Escudero either. At the end of November, a Primary Care strike began that is still active and has caused two massive demonstrations in the streets of Madrid. The unions made ugly for months that the counselor was never in the negotiations, who sat down for the first time at the end of last month. Nor was it enough to reach an agreement.
Health, with a counselor who has already been shown the exit door, is now one of the main problems with which Ayuso faces the elections on May 28.
