Madrid’s rightwing regional government has sought to dismiss a huge protest against its healthcare policies that brought at least 200,000 people on to the streets of the Spanish capital as a “failure”, and accused opposition parties of using “dirty tricks” to exploit fears over the public health system.
Sunday’s protest, coordinated by neighbourhood groups, medical unions and leftwing political parties, was held to defend public healthcare against creeping privatisation and to express concern over the regional government’s restructuring of the primary care system.
The central government’s delegation to Madrid put attendance at 200,000, but organisers said more than 650,000 had joined the demonstration.
Some medical staff are already on strike over the new model for non-hospital emergency health centres, while almost 5,000 GPs and paediatricians in the region are set to join them later this month because of “the excess workload, the endless appointments and a lack of time for seeing patients”.
Madrid’s populist regional president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, responded to the large turnout, and growing public anger, with a characteristically eccentric speech in which she reflected on the fall of the Berlin Wall, dusted off the ghost of the defunct Basque terrorist group Eta, and accused Spain’s socialist-led coalition government of conspiring to create a “de facto federal, secular republic”. Ayuso said the event had been organised at a time when the centre-left Spanish Socialist Workers’ party was being eclipsed by its rivals further to the left in the Más Madrid party.
“Yesterday’s demonstration wasn’t held in defence of public healthcare,” said Ayuso, who is one of the most high-profile members of the conservative People’s party (PP).
“It was held to find new far-left leadership for the Madrid region because of the collapse the Socialist party is going to suffer. If it had solely been a demonstration about public healthcare, don’t be in any doubt that 2 million madrileños would have attended.”
Ayuso also suggested that critics of the region’s public health system did not know what they were talking about as they probably had private healthcare.
“Instead of pursuing solutions through agreement and negotiation, instead of seeking a national agreement to solve the shortage of doctors, which is a real problem that affects the whole of Spain, the left has chosen to politicise the difficulties,” she said.
“This is a destabilising strategy from an irresponsible left that is trying desperately to cling to power or to gain power – as is the case in Madrid – through confusion, agitation and dirty tricks.”
A spokesperson for the Madrid PP was blunter still, describing the protest as a “resounding failure” because “99%” of the region’s people had not supported it.
Ángela Hernández, a surgeon and general secretary of Madrid’s AMYTS medical association, said the PP was ignoring reality.
“I wasn’t expecting to hear people from the Madrid regional government saying yesterday was a failure,” she told the Antena 3 TV channel. “I saw deniers when it came to the pandemic and the virus, but I wasn’t expecting to see deniers when it came to yesterday’s demonstration.”
Mónica García, a doctor and spokesperson for Más Madrid, announced on Monday that her party had filed an official complaint with the public ombudsman over what she termed a “constant attack” on Madrid’s public health system.
“[The PP] think that when you go to a health centre and find a tablet instead of a doctor, that’s a success,” said García. “And yet when 600,000 people come out to defend a right as basic as the right to health, they call that a failure.”
Others, meanwhile, had anticipated Ayuso’s response to the protest.
“Right now, Ayuso’s team will be weighing up various options to try to cover up what happened today,” Pablo Echenique, a senior Podemos MP, tweeted on Sunday night. “They’ll put on a hood and announce the return of Eta using a distorted voice; they’ll say public healthcare is communism, or they’ll say the Spanish flag is a million years old.”
