In May, Madrid sought to break free from the nightmare of Covid-19. Death rates and infections had fallen since the days when the Spanish capital’s international exhibition centre had been converted into a 1,000-bed intensive care unit and an ice rink into a morgue, but economic life lagged far behind.
The greater Madrid region sued the national government to relax lockdown measures — undeterred by the resignation of its director of public health in protest at the drive to open up. “If Madrid does not get going again, we will be destroying thousands of businesses, thousands of jobs,” Ignacio Aguado, the deputy head of the regional government, said shortly before the lawsuit.
Within a month, the Madrid region, of 6.6m people, had broken completely out of the lockdown and the emergency powers wielded by Spain’s national government over the regions had lapsed. Plans to lift restrictions in phases according to criteria such as health resources and infections were effectively abandoned.