The honeymoon period for Madrid's new mayor, Manuela Carmena, lasted only a few hours.
Ms Carmena (71), who took office on Saturday as the head of the Ahora Madrid leftist platform, ended a quarter century of conservative government in the Spanish capital.
But by Sunday she faced her first crisis, as it emerged that one of her councillors, Guillermo Zapata (35), had written offensive tweets in 2011 making fun of victims of the Holocaust and Basque terrorist group Eta.
On Monday she responded to the ensuing outrage by removing him as head of culture in the City Hall, though she kept him on as a member of her team.
The past has also come back to bite Ms Carmena with the revelation that her spokeswoman in City Hall, Rita Maestre, faces legal proceedings due to her part in a demonstration against the Catholic Church in 2011.
Ms Maestre (27) and other demonstrators allegedly burst into a chapel at the Complutense University in Madrid where students were praying, and brandished pictures of the pope covered with swastikas.
Ms Maestre and others then allegedly stripped to the waist and paraded topless through the chapel, chanting. She is due to be tried in a Madrid court for offending “religious feeling” and could face up to a year in prison if found guilty.
The Socialist Party, whose support allowed Ms Carmena to take office on Saturday, initially appeared to call for Ms Maestre’s resignation before backing her. But many opposition politicians are demanding she step down.
Ms Maestre has refused to do so. “It was a peaceful march which I didn’t organise,” she said on Tuesday. “I bumped into it and I joined the demonstrators. It was peacefully calling for secularism and for public buildings not to be used for religious, rather than academic, purposes.”
The new mayor has supported her, insisting that while public figures facing legal action for corruption-related charges should step down, this is a very different case.
The Ahora Madrid platform is a coalition of the leftist Podemos party and the civic group Ganemos Madrid. Ms Maestre is one of many young activists who have gone from grassroots activism to public office following regional and municipal elections on May 24th which swept the left into power across the country.
In defending her, Ms Carmena said: “It’s wonderful that a collective of young people with an attitude of confrontation with institutions should abandon that and go into those same institutions.”
However, the mayor has also come under attack in recent days, as she ditched a campaign promise to create a Madrid public bank and announced a controversial proposal for mothers of schoolchildren to help clean underfunded schools.
