The chapter lived yesterday in the thread of the phase advance of the Community of Madrid is the dangerous observation that the de-escalation is not conditioned by technical requirements, but by political strategies and temporisations. Rigor and transparency should be two of the pillars on which the Government built its action in the pandemic, but having already managed the worst moments based on improvisation and opacity, there are no signs that responsibility in the coalition will prevail now , but the most partisan arbitrariness . What happened yesterday was absurd and it is very worrying.

The Community again requested to go to phase 1 showing the improvements achieved this week in terms of epidemiology and health infrastructure. And the Government, instead of responding as it should, that is, accepting or denying the request based on the objective criteria that ensures that the de-escalation is in force, removed a new phase from its sleeve, which it considers that Madrid could do: phase 0.5. It is a stadium that nobody knew about and that seems to be an improvised response rather than part of a rigorous plan according to which to recover normalcy. The so-called phase 0.5 had not been communicated to Isabel Díaz Ayuso in the meeting she had held hours before with the central government. Given the furious and justified refusal of the regional president to accept an offer that seems to reduce de-escalation to a game of trileros in which the citizen is always cheated, Madrid will be in phase 0.

The reality is clear: at this point there is no set of transparent rules to abide by to try to protect lives while the economy is reactivating. This episode corroborates that the technical thing does not prevail, but the political discretion. We already saw last week how the convergence between PNV and Sánchez in Congress translated into a Basque a la carte de-escalation and the same negotiated ERC. The Executive makes use of this arbitrariness with Madrid, only that instead of privileging its partners it tries to wear down those who do not share its management with incomprehensible movements . That the criteria are not objective and public generates legal and social insecurity. That they are tied to political interests and not to sanitary rigor is intolerable.

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