After enduring among the longest and strictest lockdowns worldwide, Spain is beginning to alleviate its coronavirus limitations— but the efforts have not come without controversy.
Because last week, countless people have actually been enabled to visit loved ones, and sit outdoors at bars and coffee shops, in parts of the nation where the epidemic is sufficiently under control.
A significant exception, nevertheless, has actually been the Madrid area, the part of Spain hardest-hit by the coronavirus, and where the national government has rejected duplicated demands from local authorities to start relieving the lockdown restrictions.
In response, after very first banging pots and pans each night from their terraces, numerous protesters have actually required to the streets in Madrid’s rich Salamanca area over the previous week.
Waving Spanish flags and weeping “Viva España!” some protesters have knocked Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s leftist government as communists who are destroying the nation.
” I am against all the steps which this government has used to manage the coronavirus,” Jose Flores, a lender, told Reuters.
” After coronavirus, the worst virus is going to be the infection of Pedro and Pablo, who are going to mess up 47 million Spaniards,” another protester, who offered his name only as Carlos, said, referring to Sanchez and his deputy, far-left politician Pablo Iglesias.
” We are in a dictatorial system, and I understand what I’m talking about,” Magdalena, a legal representative who lives in the area, told El Pais “They are applying a decree that prohibits our flexibility.”
In a local TV interview that has gone viral on social networks, a masked female in a fur coat expressed her fury at the continued lockdown constraints.
” Throughout Franco’s time, they never locked me up in your home,” the lady said, per HuffPost Spain “In all my 70 years, they never ever made me remain at home shut away, they never ever forbid me from speaking or going for a walk.”
Another video that has been widely shared online revealed a protester screaming through a loudspeaker as he is chauffeured through the streets in a black convertible
Cuando creías haberlo visto todo … pic.twitter.com/Kt9mmlEGzr
— Guillermo Rodríguez (@guirodi) May 17, 2020
Elsewhere in Madrid, individuals have been suffering the financial impacts of the lockdown. More than 100,000 people in the Spanish capital have actually been turning to food banks