The leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal addresses the PP, Pablo Casado, seated in his seat, during the debate on the motion of no confidence.
The unexpected attack by the leader of the PP, Pablo Casado, against Santiago Abascal, in the debate on the motion of censure, left the Vox leader perplexed and hurt, who until now had a cordial relationship with his former party partner.
Abascal was knocked out, but his followers went from bewilderment to rage.
“Soraya [Sáenz de Santamaría] has just won the PP primaries,” Vox ironized on his official twitter account, alluding to the former vice president of the Government of Mariano Rajoy, with whom Casado disputed the leadership of the PP, in 2018.
Abascal bit his tongue in his reply to Casado.
“I will not contribute to the spectacle that you have given today in this gallery.
I deeply regret it and I ask you to rectify it, "he said, refusing to prolong the dialectical duel.
But other Vox leaders did not follow suit.
“Nauseating what Pablo Casado has done talking about salaries.
We will not forget it, ”wrote Ricardo Chamorro, deputy for Ciudad Real, on social networks.
If Abascal was knocked out, perplexed by the speech of the PP leader, as he repeated several times, many of his followers were furious.
The hashtags #traitors and #adiosPP were trending on Twitter.
The also Vox deputy Carla Toscano compared Casado with the Croatian Slodoban Praljak, who committed suicide by ingesting cyanide before the court that tried him for war crimes;
and Fernando Sánchez Dragó, Abascal's head intellectual, charged Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo for not having broken the voting discipline of the Popular Group.
The very harsh intervention of Casado fell to the leader of Vox like a blow.
His claim that he had become a "monosabio [young man who helps the picador in bullfights] of Pablo Iglesias" and his allusion that the PP "gave him work" for 15 years (acknowledging that he plugged him into public jobs ) received them as insults.
Until this Thursday, both politicians had maintained a good personal relationship.
After all, Abascal broke with the PP of Rajoy, but he does not hide his admiration for Aznar, Casado's political godfather, “I am a witness that Abascal has never had a bad word about Casado and, when others have had it, he has always seen [in him] a leader that I never appreciated, ”recalled Vox leader Víctor González.
Although Abascal assured that the stability of the coalition governments of the PP-Ciudadanos in Andalusia, Madrid or Murcia is not in danger, the ultra party showed its anger with gestures such as paralyzing the negotiation of budgets with the Andalusian Junta.
Vox's margin of maneuver is, however, very narrow: in Murcia, it has ceased to be relevant after expelling three of its four deputies, who can guarantee the majority to López Miras on their own;
and in Andalusia and Madrid, his only alternative is to give power to the left, which his voters would not forgive him for.
At most, you can put sticks in the wheels to Juan Manuel Moreno and Isabel Díaz Ayuso.
It is not known how long it will take for the wounds to heal.
The proximity of the Catalan elections, on February 14, does not help, since the PP and Vox will compete for the electorate that Citizens had in the last regional elections, to which the polls predict a collapse.
But Pedro Sánchez and Pablo Iglesias also had bitter confrontations, as in March 2016, when the leader of Podemos assured that Felipe González had “the past stained with quicklime”, alluding to the Lasa and Zabala case, and that has not prevented them rule together.
In politics, arithmetic rules.