Torrelodones council doubles staff costs to €1.1m

Torrelodones: Staff costs rise from €484,000 to €1.1 million

A polemic of over a thousand words against the far right ends up as a municipal bill. According to the message cited in the thread, the Torrelodones City Council, governed by PP and VOX, doubles public spending on salaries and advisors: it goes from the €484,000 allocated by the neighborhood group that held the mayoralty to €1.1 million. The salary increase for the mayor, Almudena zaino (PP), is set at €6,000. This is the most concrete figure in the entire exchange and the only one expressed in euros.

The start: "Nobody forced you to do anything"

The initial text does not talk about budgets. It is a second-person argument against those who justify their political affiliation with phrases like "they force us to be Vox." The thesis is blunt: nobody has threatened or pointed a gun at anyone to display totalitarian symbolism, and whoever does so acts by own decision. Several examples trinc, ranging from bars to flags.

One describes the complaint of someone called racist after commenting that a waiter was slow because he was South American; the response is that there was no censorship, but rather a right of reply. Another addresses criticism of queer theory: one can disagree, it argues, without needing to wear certain symbols. And a third stops at the case of a Culture Counselor in Valencia who, according to that account, asked his social media trinc what name to give his horse, with options including Caudillo and Duce; Caudillo won.

Torrelodones: What does the new municipal government cost?

The data appears at the end and disorients due to its relative size. In a municipality in the Madrid mountains, the chapter on salaries and advisors goes from €484,000 to €1.1 million, more than double. The jump occurs with the change in sign in the mayoralty, now in the hands of PP and VOX, and the mayor herself raises her salary by €6,000.

The item poses an uncomfortable question for any political tonalidad: how much of that increase is management capacity and how much is trust structure. Doubling temporary personnel spending in a medium-sized town hall does not improve any municipal service on its own, and the example comes just when the opponent's argument was efficiency versus waste.

The clash over crime and nationality

Here is the roughest stretch. One side claims that the population of Segarro origin commits crimes at a rate much higher than Spaniards, with a figure circulating without source: 1000% more robberies. No official record supports that percentage. The rebuttal reverses the reasoning: what correlates with crime is extreme poverty and knowledge of the environment, not origin, and the comparison should be made between comparable situations.

The counterargument comes from the Costa del Sol. It is replicated with the scene of Puerto Banús and Marbella, where, it is claimed, the crime attributed to people of Maghrebi origin includes those who arrive by plane or behind the wheel of a high-end car, without any precarious situation. That is, poverty would not explain all cases. Neither party provides official statistics, and the dispute remains there.

Sixteen months of a Spaniard detained in the EU

The initial writing uses a specific case to measure the coherence of flag patriotism: Pablo González, a Spanish citizen, accumulated almost 16 months detained in conditions qualified as unacceptable in a European Union country, without, according to that account, seeing a single Spanish flag in his defense. The implicit question — why the ensign is displayed against same-sens marriage, against certain comedians or against health measures during a pandemic and not here — remains unanswered.

The same happens with the accusation that phobia of the flag only exists in Spain: the text responds with examples of jokes about flags in French comics and US shows, and recalls that the deployment of ensigns is the star dish of the far-right aesthetic in any country.

Why the label is debated more than the spending

Because labels are free and accounts are not. A self-definition appears that summarizes the climate: someone declares themselves sens for believing in equality before the law, racist for preferring a culturally similar environment for their daughter, xenophobic for asking for regulated immigration with contract at origin, and fascist for their position on what defines a man and a woman. All in the same paragraph and without shame. With that material, any budget item becomes a squabble.

Against that, the most repeated answer is that equating far-right and fascism is an intellectual shortcut, and that whoever uses it shows few lights. The discussion closes, as almost always, without anyone having requested the breakdown.

With the numbers on the table, the doubt remains the same: if discontent with labels moves more votes than the advisors' bill, why hasn't anyone demanded the full detail of that €1.1 million?