Liverpool FC fans have renamed Margaret Thatcher Square in Madrid after Jeremy Corbyn ahead of the team’s Champions League final against Tottenham Hotspur.
The Spanish capital became the first city in the world to name a square after the controversial former Tory prime minister, whose political legacy is divisive in Liverpool.
Now, supporters of the Merseyside team have taken over the area and rebranded it as Jeremy Corbyn Square in reference to the city’s long history of supporting the Labour Party.
Paul Doherty, one of the fans involved in the renaming, said they were frustrated by the commemoration to Thatcher and decided to cover her name with their own signs for Mr Corbyn.
“We don’t appreciate that a woman can be celebrated like that in a foreign country where there is no understanding of the damage she’s actually done,” Mr Doherty said.
He added: “You know Liverpool is Labour, it always has been and it always will be so we thought we’d commemorate that with Jezza over there.
“We took over Thatcher Square, it’s now Corbyn Square.”
Merseyside has consistently elected a majority of Labour MPs since it was created in 1974.
The decision to name the square in Madrid after Thatcher was made by the then-ruling right-wing Popular Party in 2014.
The square, which contains a Hard Rock Café and five-star hotel, had existed for decades but had not previously been given a name.
Thatcher was the first British prime minister to make an official visit to Spain when she travelled there in 1988.
In 2015, Madrid’s left-wing mayor Manuela Carmena indicated that she was looking to remove Thatcher’s name from the square, reportedly saying she “did not want a space for public use in town to be named after the Iron Lady who enslaved the workers".
The former Conservative leader was deeply unpopular in Liverpool, where she clashed with the Militant-led Labour council in the 1980s.
Critics of Thatcher have argued that her government allowed the region to decline and caused unemployment and poverty in the city to rise.
