Más Madrid President Mónica García together with Deputy Javier Padilla Borja Sánchez-Trillo (EFE)
Mónica García, leader of Más Madrid and the opposition in the regional assembly, stands for the reassessment of the municipal and regional elections on 28 the region. The data reflects that the political revelation of the May 2021 elections, which catapulted the platform founded by Íñigo Errejón and Manuela Carmena to the reference of the Madrid left, begins with a potential disadvantage in the fight that it will wage with the PP of Isabel Díaz Ayuso (for regional presidency) and with the PSOE of Juan Lobato (for leadership of the left). The 2021 election was regional only. Now the municipalities are also elected. And for voters, voting for a different party in each constituency appears to be more of a challenge than voting the same acronym in both ballot boxes. Although there are recent precedents to the contrary: in 2019, Ángel Gabilondo received twice as many votes as Pepu Hernández in the capital, despite both representing the PSOE. The debate is therefore open.
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“Mónica ran in the 2021 elections and therefore many people have already put the Más Madrid ballot on it, which is already an established brand. The ticket effect is pulled because there is already that memory of voting,” argues a source from the party’s elections committee. “In addition, the percentage of the eligible population that will not have a municipal vote for Más Madrid is very small: around 8%,” continues this interlocutor, who points to the almost 60 lists on which the party will be (some in coalitions , which it will not lead) will reach 92% of Madrid residents, which is an improvement compared to the 31 lists of 2019. “Most of the population is concentrated in the capital and the large communities of the red belt, the Corridor del Henares and the mountains,” he describes. “The rest are sparsely populated municipalities, and for a party that has formed in recent years and has also had to stop everything to run in extraordinary elections, it is out of the question there,” he adds. But he admits: “Obviously, the parties with a long tradition and greater territorial roots have this advantage, that of solid structures. We have others.”
The ticket effect, a concept borrowed from the US elections, is at the heart of the campaign by the region’s major parties. The PP considers the duo of President Díaz Ayuso and Mayor José Luis Martínez-Almeida unbeatable. The PSOE hopes that landing a minister like Reyes Maroto in local politics will help establish a project led in the community by a leader, Lobato, who has been running the organization for a little over a year. And Más Madrid bets everything on the multiplier effect that the union of García with Rita Maestre can have. A mutual-feeding formula they cannot rely on in most communities in the region.
“In my opinion, it could have some impact, since in the case of simultaneous municipal and regional elections in the Autonomous Community of Madrid, what is voted in the municipal and regional elections can have a mutual braking effect, especially in large municipalities where the people that are on the municipal list can have less influence on the voting decision of voters,” analyzes Carlos Fernández, Professor of Constitutional Law at UNED and PhD in Political Science.
“There’s the ticket effect, but it doesn’t affect the profile of the Más Madrid voter that much. The traditional parties are more affected,” states consultant Eduardo G. Vega, who also sees no insurmountable handicap in the fact that Más Madrid is not present in all communities. “This is done for strategic reasons,” he says. “It is clear that logically, the more seats your ballots have, there are always more opportunities to vote for you. But this is studied beforehand and you exclude those places where you already know that you will not achieve the minimum required result (due to ideology, knowledge …) and therefore it is not worth investing resources (money and effort , to create a list , campaign, structure… .)”, he elaborates. And he concludes: “Therefore it does not affect and if it does, it will be something minimal.”
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“Mas Madrid must promote the Autonomous Region, with particular focus on the municipalities where it does not represent a candidacy for City Hall, in order not to lose space in the minds of voters, but with the important advantage of having a solid candidate for the Autonomous Community of Madrid, or even ask for the vote of a municipal candidate with whom they can ally to cover their inability to represent themselves in the municipality”, recipe Paloma Román Marugán, from the Department of Political Science and Administration of the Complutense University of Madrid.
Although the 2023 electoral map is still being finalized, Más Madrid will be present in all cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants, most with 50,000 and many with up to 15,000, according to a second party leader interlocutor. Therefore, Más Madrid must offer its ballots to voters in Madrid, Móstoles, Leganés, Getafe, Pozuelo, Villaviciosa, Parla, Alcalá, San Fernando, Alcorcón, Móstoles, Getafe, Parla, Pinto, Aranjuez, Valdemoro, Alcobendas, San Sebastián de los Reyes , Colmenar, Tres cantos or Rivas (in the last two, for example, it is integrated into electoral coalitions).
The challenge is enormous. In the 2021 regional elections, all of the region’s municipalities except two, Fuentidueña de Tajo and El Atazar, were colored blue, the color of the PP, because their neighbors largely supported the conservative leader. And the Conservatives added more seats than the entire left combined. To change this balance, the PSOE is betting on the weight of its municipal organizations, as mayors are now also elected: the Socialists govern some of the most populous cities in the region (Móstoles, Alcalá de Henares, Leganés, Getafe, Fuenlabrada… .) and are hoping for a multiplier effect in favor of lobato.
More Madrid does not have this weapon. In her case, then, much will depend on what happens in the capital, the city with the most voters: without Carmena as a candidate, for a party that cannot trust her, getting the vote flow of 2019 to the regional level will be crucial to relocate . Offsetting potential losses with gains in the small communities of the community.
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