On Wednesday we learned that the Community of Madrid bought a luxury penthouse that was going to serve as the temporary office of the president while the rehabilitation of the Royal Post Office lasted. If any sneeze from Isabel Díaz Ayuso deserves a four-column headline and twelve hours of discussion on La 1, you can imagine the fuss the news was causing. In an attempt to quell the controversy, the CAM announced this Thursday that it is putting the penthouse up for sale to «expand the budget» for reconstruction after the fires.
But this turn does not clear up the initial questions: didn’t the Community of Madrid have enough spaces to temporarily host the president’s meetings? If the answer is no, wouldn’t renting have been the most logical way to meet a provisional need? If the answer is no, was a luxury penthouse the best option? Were there really no more reasonable alternatives? Besides, what sense did it make to buy a property catalogued for residential use as an office? And what function was the 200-square-meter terrace going to serve?
While the details are clarified, we can conclude that we are, at least, facing a strategic shipwreck. I don’t know how much the gurus surrounding the president of the Community of Madrid are paid, but they should have their salaries cut. Even if the operation ends up proving perfectly logical and legal, it will still be difficult to explain how no one warned that bringing together the words «penthouse», «Ayuso» and «Chamberí» again could be risky.
I do not know if there were unconfessable reasons behind the purchase of the apartment, as the opposition suggests, but it is clear that the explanations remain insufficient and that this populist swerve sounds like a correction. It does not resolve the controversy; if anything, it aggravates it. If the penthouse was the best solution to temporarily host the presidency, it still is today. The fire in the Sierra Oeste does not change that need. If it has ceased to be so just a few hours after the controversy broke out, it never was. And there is more: if the official explanation is that a region with a budget exceeding 30 billion euros needs to sell an apartment to finance the reconstruction of an area devastated by fire, I do not want to imagine how grotesque the truth will be.