Pablo Casado (in the center) during a telematic meeting this Monday at the headquarters of the PP in Madrid.DAVID MUDARRA / PP / PP / EFE
Former president José María Aznar has reappeared again this week, on the 25th anniversary of the first triumph of the PP in a general election, to once again criticize the following leaders of his party, Mariano Rajoy and Pablo Casado, for disuniting the project center-right that he forged.
A prominent Aznarista, Jaime Mayor Oreja, warned this Monday of the "risk of extinction" of the PP if it does not integrate with Vox in a relationship almost of equals.
The PP of Casado chose to ignore these reflections and that of Rajoy reproaches him for his constant unchecking.
The fasting positions of any self-criticism of José María Aznar are not new and provoke different reactions in the PP that he led for 14 years.
The current PP of Pablo Casado, with whom he will see this Tuesday in a meeting of the Atlantic Institute sponsored by the former president, takes his recurring criticisms of the disunity of the center-right as something alien, distant, repetitive.
His allusions to the fact that when he left he delivered "a totally united electoral space" or his attribution that he managed to unite "everything that was to the right of the left" are analyzed from a great distance, as if they had nothing to do with it. with the present inherited two and a half years ago by Casado.
The resentment is much more acute in the surroundings of Rajoy, especially due to the relationship that in these years as former president Aznar himself has wanted to privilege towards the leaders of Ciudadanos, Albert Rivera, and Vox, Santiago Abascal, whom he has cared for with care, in the face of criticism that has not been reserved towards the project that he named as his successor in 2003.
Aznar has not only always publicly spoken highly of Abascal's "virtues" but on Sunday, in an interview on La Sexta, he refused to qualify Vox as a far-right party.
His former Minister of the Interior, Jaime Mayor Oreja, one of the three deputy general secretaries of the PP in his time in the party and with good personal and political relations with Abascal and his family in Euskadi, positioned himself this Monday in an interview in Onda Madrid in a manner very distant with the PP of Casado and Rajoy.
He blamed Rajoy for not having done politics and having limited himself to "managing" during his time in government.
And he questioned Casado for trying to radically distance himself from Vox: “The alternative project to the popular front cannot be done without Vox, which was born because the PP did not provide many people with peace of mind.
The social base of Vox and PP are similar although the leaders are different.
This is where an alternative to the popular front must be proposed ”.
Jaime Mayor thus advocated repeating the experience that he promoted in the Basque Country in 1984 with the integration into the Popular Coalition at 50% in the lists of AP candidates with UCD and that Aznar later extended to the national level with the re-founding of the PP in the 1990 Congress of Seville.
Like Albert Rivera
Aznar has invited Pablo Casado this Tuesday to the Leadership Classroom of the Atlantic Institute of Government, which he presides, the same place he took in May 2017 the then leader of Citizens, Albert Rivera, which caused friction with Mariano's team Rajoy.
It was not the only misinterpreted gesture.
In 2016 he left the honorary presidency of the PP, after 12 years, distanced from the leadership of that party in which he never wanted to participate in its meetings.
Aznar handpicked Rajoy in 2003 because he considered that he was a better candidate to keep the PP together than Rodrigo Rato or Jaime Mayor Oreja.
Members of that initial Aznar team and others that are later and who are not in the theses close to Vox de Mayor, nevertheless, specify that both in Euskadi and in the re-founding of the PP what happened was that that party assumed from a position of greater strength the remains of the UCD already in extinction.
Those same leaders support Casado's line of definitively distancing himself from Vox and trying integration in the near future, but in the moderate center and with Ciudadanos: "Escorting towards Vox would be giving the entire center to the PSOE or Citizens, a mistake."
Mayor Oreja assured this Monday, after stating that the current PP "is in decline", that he did not want to point out anyone as guilty but did compare the balance of the different leaderships in the party: "Aznar assumed that the PP's corporate purpose was to unite , add and synthesize the center right.
If the PP of now does not understand that its social function is not that, it loses its social purpose, the crisis arrives and can lead to the disappearance as happened to UCD.
If what the PP does is to characterize itself in making sanitary cords against the center right, its function disappears ”.