The right is uncomfortable with women's rights



Simone de Beauvoir said:

"Never forget that a political, economic or religious crisis will be enough for the rights of women to be questioned again. These rights are never taken for granted, you must remain vigilant all your life"

In this case, the health, social and economic crisis is the excuse or the smokescreen that the rights in Madrid are using to cut our rights and make women invisible.

But make no mistake, it is not just about making concessions to their government partners (Vox), the right wing (Vox-PP and CS) have never believed this about equality and, obviously, feminism bothers them.

And what happened this week, the attempt to eliminate a mural that makes visible women leaders in history and the suppression of the General Directorate of Equality, is nothing more than the culmination of a series of unfortunate and sad events that have been happening to throughout this last year and a half.

It began in November 2019 with the announced proposal of the famous 21 measures against gender violence, with which the delegate of the Family, Equality and Social Welfare Area showed his propaganda display to sell initiatives that, in reality, are only smoke , because without budget support they are nothing more than advertisements.

Of all the measures, only those that consisted of "promoting" existing projects have been complied with. All those that implied the design and creation of new resources are unmanaged: neither a crisis center for victims of sexual violence, nor the Municipal Point III of the Regional Observatory of Gender Violence, nor an emergency center for victims of trafficking ... nothing .

Then came the famous Villa Pacts and they wanted to make women invisible as the group most affected by the pandemic. From Más Madrid we had to fight thoroughly to include them in the negotiated recovery measures and, even more so, to incorporate measures to strengthen care services for victims of sexist violence. Despite the evidence that all the data showed on the increase in cases due to confinement, they looked for puns not to mention sexist violence, this was an explicit condition of Vox, of course, but we did not allow it.

If we land in the districts, throughout the current mandate, the municipal government has questioned the spaces of equality in multiple proposals in the district plenary sessions.

As soon as they arrived at the City Council, they forced the Equality Spaces to eliminate any symbolism that could be 'revolutionary', including the last institutional campaign of the 8M of the stage of the Carmena Government. The next thing was that they questioned the extension of the contracts in force and, as a definitive sign of their contempt for equality, the PP has not tendered a single new Equality Space, compared to the nine opened during the two years of operation of the Gender and Diversity Policies Area.

If we talk about the legislative framework, we come across another false advertisement, the Equality Ordinance. In March 2020 they reported that it was going to be developed, but, when the time came to present the Regulatory Plan, where the regulations that the City Council plans to develop during the following year are made explicit, it does not appear. Therefore, in 2021 there will be no Equality Ordinance or any other similar norm and the mayor himself made it clear: The Ordinance is neither by consensus nor will it be approved ", so it seems clear that there is no intention of developing it in the next years.

And in recent weeks we have found the last straw, the alleged removal of the La Concepción mural and the dismissal of the general director of Equality, accompanied by the disappearance of her area. At this point, and no matter how much marketing exercise they want to do, there is no one to whitewash this anymore. The reality is that equality has gone from being something irrelevant for PP and Cs during their first two years at the helm of the City Council to being something deeply annoying that they want to eliminate.

Madrid has been covered in the British newspaper The Guardian for the news of the removal of the mural and is in Spanish national media for the restructuring of the General Directorate of Equality and the cut in staff. They are giving a false excuse that these resources are necessary to face the social emergency, when the Madrid City Council has a Budget of more than 5,000 million euros, which it can spend without fiscal rules and when equality policies only involve 27 million.

In short, what is a certainty, clear evidence, is that the rights are uncomfortable with women's rights, but we will not tolerate any setback. Fortunately, society is more mature than some of its leaders are showing and it will not allow any cuts in the rights obtained.

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