“PP is back,” cried Pablo Casado (Palencia, 1981) on July 21, 2018, when he confirmed his victory at the XIX Congress of the People’s Party and became the third leader in the history of conservative formation, after Jose Maria Aznar. And Mariano Rajoy. Three and a half years after the actual barons of his party walked out the back door, the conclusion is that the PP never came back and, of course, the voters who gave him an absolute majority in 2011 and beyond. No, power like never before in 2015 … nor the one who forced him to win the 2016 generals as the first power with a tougher majority.
But it was not the loss of electoral support, nor the constant rapprochement with the extreme right that he allowed in the institutions, nor the corruption cases that were settled in court, which ended Cassado’s political career, this Friday, the first day. His successor Congress has announced that he is leaving all positions in the PP and also his place in Las Cortes.
Eventually his downfall was a bloody civil war that for months severed friendship with the current president of the Madrid community, Isabelle Diaz Ayuso, a stranger to the general public, who himself put his finger on a candidate in 2019. With some internal rejection, but who, in just two years, not only managed to overshadow his mentor with a more radical speech than Casado himself, but also won the election and became one of the party’s great referents and above all. In the leader’s main internal enemy.
An absolute shock over the shadows that continue the contract that allowed the Madrid president’s brother to collect the commission forced Cassado to resign in February last year, without the support of the bloodless struggle in which he was. friend. As of this Saturday, Casado is officially leaving the PP presidency, although he has not actually held any executive office for more than a month. He will be replaced by one of his barons, Alberto Nunez Feio, who at the last minute refused to vote in the 2018 primaries but who has always tried to build his own profile over the years.
Although he was the first president-elect at the primaries, Cassado’s leadership was weak and short-lived, with the shortest being at the head of the PP: three years and seven months, compared to Aznar and Rajoy’s 14 years, respectively. Although he became accustomed to referring to Aznar and Fraga, in the end he resembled Hernandez Mancha.
He won the XIX Congress thanks to the votes of the delegates after all the internal rivals of the former president, Soraya Saint-de-Santamaria, conspired in his favor, who received the most support in the first round of the primaries as leader. Votes received from party militants and whom Casado met during the conclave.
He was the second most supported by the branches, but his candidacy was later joined by former Secretary-General Maria Dolores de Cospedal – who competed for control of the Saint-de-Santamaria party during Rajoy’s term – controlling much of the party’s structures. PP as well as other applicants who attended the internal proceedings.
This support conditioned his entire mandate: he had to involve Cospedal-led leaders in his direction, who eventually, like many positions close to the former minister, had to leave politics due to their involvement in the corruption case, Operation Kitchen. Espionage with the party’s former treasurer, who was conspired to seize evidence from the Rajoy’s government’s interior ministry and Genova 13, who could be accused of forming a conservative group in another corrupt conspiracy, Gurtel.
The trials of this practice, which are still being investigated by the courts, have further weakened Casado, whose main goal when he became PP president, after Pedro Sanchez’s petition against Rajoy, was to break the party’s corrupt past. Unsuccessful and fed up with the bad news from the court, he even promised to sell the party’s national headquarters, which, like almost everything in those years, was also suspected of being paid black money from the treasury. B. But the headquarters, which is already preparing to welcome its successor to the seventh floor, lasted longer than the leader himself, who recently wanted to use the party’s cleaning champion to openly investigate his rival’s practices. inside. His argument was strong: he had evidence that the brother of the president of Madrid had taken advantage of a contract signed by the government of the Madrid community at the worst moment of the pandemic. “When 700 people die in Spain every day,” Cassado told Carlos Herrera in an interview, which put an end to his term.
Years ago, Cassado himself had to explain how he earned a master’s degree. The same judge who investigated Cristina Fluentes found that the new PP leader also won the title without going to class and taking exams. He took the case to the Supreme Court, convinced that the master’s degree was in fact a “pretense” because of its political urgency. Gift.
However, the Supreme Court refused to investigate him. The judges, led by Manuel Marchena, said there were “signs of favorable treatment” but not the crime. They made it clear in the ordinance that there was no trace of the work, did not go to the lesson and did not know how to get the outstanding. Despite everything, Casado went ahead because no one in the party objected to it.
And that four months after winning the primaries, Cassado received the worst election result for the PP in the general election. On April 28, 2019, the popular won only 66 seats in Congress, 71 less than in the previous election. Many feared the death of the party. In the November re-election of the same year, the PP leader improved support and reached 88 MPs, making it the second worst figure for his party in the history of democracy.
Cassado’s leadership has been particularly threatened since May 2021, when the same Ayuso he nominated as Madrid’s candidate won the Madrid election, falling just four places behind for the absolute majority. He reached out to more than three representatives of the left-wing forces and absorbed the entire voice of Ciudadanos – who was his government partner for two months – who lost all representation in the Madrid Assembly.
Ayuso’s threat was justified by the fact that the “unification” of rights in the PP was divided into three – except popularVox and Ciudadanos – what has plagued Cassado since winning the primaries – has never been implemented in an election in which he was the main leader – the celebrities got the worst results in their history in two 2019 general elections -.
Unity began to form in Madrid, one of the strongholds of the Conservative parties, in the hands of Ayuso, who always wanted to maintain his own and differentiated profile from the PP leader, with radicalized messages closer to Vox, the party that. He also approached Casado to seek an electoral effect similar to that of his Madrid Baroness.
The unity of right-wing votes in the PP is maintained in Galicia, another stronghold of conservatism, in the hands of a leader with a very different profile from the IUSU’s profile: Alberto Nunez Feio, president of the Xunta de Galicia; Neither Citizens nor Vox have representatives in the regional parliament there. Feio will now be in charge of the match, with acclamation as well as the support of Ayuso.
The People’s National President felt the danger of his companion and friend in the streets. The general indifference with which he was met for months at rallies or public events, including by his own constituents, ran counter to the anger that IUSO is causing among conservative voters, the latest evidence of which can be seen at last Saturday’s rallies. Massive, which happened at the gate of the PP National Headquarters and which demanded the resignation of Cassado.
Cassado has never been able to overcome the split in the right-wing electorate, though his radicalization strategy has been in all election appointments since 2018 – except for the May Madrid election, in which victory owes much to Isabel’s personalism. Dia Ayuso, rather than the leader of the PP – was unsuccessful and this led to the accumulation of defeats in a row in the voting, he bore fruit until last fall in the elections.
But in addition to the stimulus that Ayusu’s victory has given the PP, polls have attributed this recovery to the depreciation of the government during the pandemic and the collapse of Ciudadanos, one of the three on the right. After 10N the election failed miserably one after the other, at its main square, in Catalonia, it moved from the first to the seventh force and disappeared from the Madrid assembly.
Cassado believed that the formation of the Inés Arrimadas was amortized, weighed down by its continuous rotation, and partly absorbed by the PP, not only at the electoral level, but also in the case of some of its most prominent leaders, such as Fran Hervias. Or Tony Canto, who has moved into their popular ranks.
What he failed to achieve during his brief reign was to neutralize right-wing rival Vox. Despite compromising its rhetoric and form, Santiago Abascal’s party remained in the last election – in Castile and Leონშიn – it went from one to 13 seats, while the PP barely reached more than two, with fewer votes than in 2019 – and is resisting in the election and taking the lead. The burden is on PP to achieve a comfortable majority when elections are re-scheduled.
Cassado’s relationship with the far right has had its ups and downs. While PP and Vox have maintained their alliances – in various formulas – in Andalusia, the Madrid community or the Murcia region, as well as in city halls such as Madrid or Zaragoza, in recent years they have been aired simultaneously in public. Your bad relationships.
Cassado has been trying to differentiate himself from the far right for months, after offering him ministries on the last day of the 2019 election campaign and taking a theoretical break with Santiago Abascal in October 2021 during a failed censorship petition filed by Vox against Pedro Sanchez. But the ultra-party attitude to maintain autonomous and municipal governments and the struggle for right-wing hegemony – and the same electorate – that both formations maintained for three years, has forced the opposition leader to adjust his agenda to the pace. That Abaskal was mentioned.
In its final stages, the former PP leader has compromised with some extreme right-wing postulates, particularly in terms of immigration, against social advances such as euthanasia or trans law, and, more recently, in agreement with historical revisionism. With the civil war and dictatorship.
Source: El Diario
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