Ugh.

I read that the government is pledged to remove the influence of the church from education. So I’m guessing there’ll be some more fireworks in the next few years between Aguirre and the guv.

@Graeme
You’re underestimating your enemy. She has been a minister, senator and President of the Senate and euro-MP. She is totally unbearable, but you can’t deny her curriculum.

@richardska
The Comunidad de Madrid is a disaster. It has done nothing for the people of the region since Espe bribed her way into the presidency. El Paí­s ran a story the other day about how 4 out of 5 proposals debated in the assembly are attacks on the government of Spain. The health system has been seriously and systematically undermined beginning with the Severo Ochoa affair (and continuing with a spate of unnecessary hospitals being built in order to channel money out of the public sector into the private and deplete perfectly good ones of its doctors. Education has been handed over to Opus Dei. The Sierra de Guadarrama National Park has been subverted to serve the ends of property speculators and construction companies. Achievements – zero, I can’t think of a single thing that the Comunidad has done right in the last five years.

Madrid has been a PP stronghold for many years now and, in spite of the scandals and unexplained affaires she has been involved in, Mrs Aguirre has managed to gain more support, even in traditionally leftist regions, like some of the towns in the industrial outlying areas of Madrid.

Seen from Madrid, it might look like Mrs Aguirre is very powerful and influential in the PP. However, her support comes strictly from some of the most outspoken far-right media (El Mundo and Libertad Digital), who share her liberal -in the European sense- views, her strong opposition to any kind of negotiation with ETA, and her vision of a Spain with less powers for the regions and more control from Madrid.

During Zapatero’s first term, Aguirre and her supporting media group have dominated the political agenda of the PP but the last elections have shown that the gains in Madrid, Valencia and Murcia have come at the cost of a virtually political death in Catalonia and the Basque Country, where the PSOE didn’t need to do much more than scaring voters by showing pictures of Aguirre, Acebes and Zaplana to get an overwhelming victory. Acebes and Zaplana are gone and the PP knows they need a more centered candidate if they want to have a chance next time. Aguirre simply does not have that profile.

Tell me, what did you make of the video? Doesn’t she come out of it rather poorly? Rather than relying on the say-so of two people who may well be part of her cabal, I ask you to judge her actions in the video footage and tell me that she comes out of it looking either nice or, for that matter, presidential.

Also – does anyone know why she was given this ridiculous ‘knighthood’ anyway? I can’t any info about it.