Pablo Casado, a 41-year-old from Palencia and the first president of the PP elected by primaries, will leave office on April 2 forced and practically alone.
The confrontation with Isabel Díaz Ayuso, for whom he bet in 2019 to the surprise of those who have now forced his departure, encouraged many to collect old debts, especially with his right-hand man, Teodoro García Egea.
When he leaves office after the extraordinary congress in April, he will have spent 1,352 days at the head of the Popular Party, three years and just eight months.
His predecessors, Mariano Rajoy and José María Aznar occupied it for 14 years.
In his environment they point out that he will not go from party president to ordinary deputy and will resign from his seat.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo will count on him if he finally decides to continue in politics.
The primaries.
"We would have voted for anyone who wasn't Soraya"
Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría and Pablo Casado at meals with their respective supporters for the primaries in which Mariano Rajoy's successor was elected in 2018.
His arrival at the presidency of the PP was, as members of his own team admit, propitiated by the rivalry between Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría and Dolores de Cospedal.
When the second was eliminated in the first round of voting, she mobilized her support against her enemy and in favor of Casado, who prevailed in the July 2018 congress with a resounding 57% of the votes of the delegates.
Former Minister of Foreign Affairs José Manuel García Margallo, also an enemy of the former vice president, summed it up in an interview with EL PAÍS: “Married did not win the primaries.
We would have voted for anyone who was not Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría.”
In 2015, Rajoy had given Casado a position in the party, deputy secretary of communication, in a batch of appointments that sought to rejuvenate the PP and shake off the image of a
nasty party
that Esperanza Aguirre complained about
.
Married was then 34 years old.
He had previously been Aznar's chief of staff;
deputy in the Assembly of Madrid and president of New Generations of the Community.
He graduated in Law after passing 12 subjects in one semester.
The University opened and closed an investigation after concluding that there were no anomalies.
His master's degree at Rey Juan Carlos was also controversial.
The Supreme Court saw signs of “favorable treatment”, but considered that there was no crime, although “it could deserve other types of considerations outside of Criminal Law”.
Rescue of aznarismo.
“He is a leader like a castle”
Casado and Aznar, during a meeting in Genoa.PP
The first guests to the office of the new president of the PP in 2018 marked the beginning of the end of Marianismo.
After receiving Rajoy, Casado met with Aznar, who had dedicated the last years of his successor to publicly criticizing him, which is why he was not invited to the congress where the PP elected its new leader.
From there, Casado pulled from the FAES environment to configure his team and his electoral lists.
His first chief of staff was Javier Fernández-Lasquetty, who had described Rajoy as a “bad memory”.
Lasquetty, who was sent to Puerta del Sol to help Díaz Ayuso in the management of the Community, ended up choosing the Madrid president in the war against Casado.
In the ideological convention that the leader of the PP convened in January 2019, Marianism was definitively buried.
Aznar anointed Casado as a new referent of the right with the phrase that Fraga had dedicated to him in 1990: “Without tutelas or
guardianships
.
He is a leader like a castle.”
And the leader of the popular ones delivered a harsh speech, to the right of Rajoy and close to Vox: "Murderers, rapists and pedophiles are on the streets because of the Stockholm syndrome of progress," he said.
The first crisis of leadership.
“This has never been done like this”
Casado's first electoral lists caused a storm in the party and its first great leadership crisis.
The sorayistas were separated and the new signings stung in the PP cadres.
In the place that he had occupied, for example, Fátima Báñez, former Minister of Employment, head of the list for Huelva, Casado put Juan José Cortés, father of a murdered girl and face of the campaign for the reviewable permanent prison.
Former general coordinator Fernando Martínez-Maíllo was also removed from first place by Zamora.
Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, who in 2015 broke with Rajoy, assuring that she had no reason to defend his government, headed the list for Barcelona.
The majority of provincial presidents did not know on Friday that Genoa announced the names of their heads of list for the elections of April 28, 2019 who would occupy those positions.
"This has never been done like this," they lamented.
Juan José Cortés has all my admiration, respect and gratitude, he continues to be a reference for everyone and if I am president of the PP I hope he is close to me.
We have to protect the victims not only with criminal measures but also with social and educational measures #ElPPqueQueremos pic.twitter.com/gi7kq3T9al
– Pablo Casado Blanco (@pablocasado_) July 15, 2018
Displaced by Casado from the lists and organic positions and dissatisfied with the direction the party was taking, many sorayistas, among whom were former ministers and former secretaries of state, abandoned ship behind their candidate, who signed for Cuatrecasas and has not returned to hold political demonstrations.
Casado then included bullfighters on his lists and placed Adolfo Suárez Illana at number two for Madrid, whom he would end up removing after several controversies, including ensuring that in New York “a law had just been approved by which abortion is allowed after of birth” and that “the Neanderthals also used it, but they waited for it to be born and cut off its head”.
Batacazo in the general, oxygen in the autonomic ones.
"If you speak, they cut off your head"
In April 2019, Casado crashed at the polls: he obtained 66 deputies (they came from 137).
The depleted Marianista sector attributed the debacle to the "right-wing" of the party and took its license plate, but with the regional and municipal ones in sight (May 26) they put their knives away.
The post-election pacts with Ciudadanos gave oxygen to the leader of the PP.
“In this we work just like the PSOE”, summed up a veteran popular leader at the time.
”Problems are solved with power.
Our result in the general elections was disastrous, but the regional and municipal pacts have allowed us to govern and distribute power and that gives an appearance of success, although the problems are still there.
There are many people uncomfortable with the current leadership, but they are afraid to speak because they have seen what happens: if you speak, they cut off your head or corner you.
Trips (round trip) to the center.
“It has moderated”
Between his first general elections and his first regional elections, Casado seemed to make an amendment.
He called Vox “extreme right” for the first time and launched himself for the votes of Ciudadanos.
Pressured by the barons, he changed his strategy.
He said then one of the autonomous presidents of the PP: "he has made self-criticism, has moderated and has focused."
That was one of his many trips to the center - all with a return ticket.
The man who in January 2019 dedicated 21 consecutive insults to Pedro Sánchez ("the greatest traitor, the greatest felon in the democratic history of Spain, an illegitimate president, an irresponsible, incompetent, disloyal, a compulsive liar, a catastrophe, an incompetent, a mediocre, a squat...”), he said in September: “Pedro Sánchez deserves all our respect, but his program does not deserve our support”.
The "unapologetic" right-wing model that Casado had imposed upon his arrival was not working.
He had to recover the managers, but many were no longer there.
Behind Sáenz de Santamaría were the former Minister of Employment (Fátima Báñez), the Minister of Finance (Cristóbal Montoro), the Minister of Development (Íñigo de la Serna), the Nadal brothers, the former Secretary of State for relations with the Cortes José Luis Ayllón ... Barons of the PP summarize it as a "decapitalization" of the party.
In his second electoral lists, chastened, Casado rectified: he replaced Suárez Illana with former minister Ana Pastor as number two for Madrid and incorporated two other former ministers, Isabel García Tejerina and Elvira Rodríguez, in fourth and fifth place.
Cortés jumped from the lists to the Congress to those of the Senate and was not elected.
Aware that he did not have the barons 100% on his side, Teodoro García Egea carried out an operation to place provincial leaders closer to Genoa.
Where they could, they also changed the regional ones.
After more than 30 years of service to the party, most of them under the threat of ETA, the leader of the popular Basques, Alfonso Alonso, abandoned politics after Casado decided to replace him as a candidate for the regional elections by Carlos Iturgaiz.
In the general elections on November 10, a recovery exam, the PP won 22 seats.
With a speech deliberately different from that of Genoa, more moderate, Alberto Núñez Feijóo achieved his fourth absolute majority in the Galician elections and left Vox and Ciudadanos to zero.
In Euskadi, with a candidate imposed by Casado and a campaign made in his image and likeness, the PP lost four seats that were actually five because they had to share them with Cs, while Vox entered the Basque Parliament for the first time.
In the Catalan elections of February 2021, the popular ones obtained their worst data in the community: three seats.
In the advances of Castilla y León, on February 13, the PP won, but it needs the extreme right to govern.
The relationship with Vox.
"hawks and doves"
The objective of the PP was to recover the voters of Ciudadanos and Vox, blowing and sipping at the same time.
As barons and former party leaders warned, Casado addressed, above all, the seconds, neglecting the center.
His speech is very similar to that of Abascal on issues such as historical memory-the popular leader came to question in Congress that the Civil War had broken out due to a coup-;
both keep ETA very present on the political agenda -which announced the definitive cessation of violence more than 10 years ago- and use the term "pull effect" to refer to the government's immigration policy.
Except for who has ended up being his main enemy, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, Casado has always been to the right of the regional presidents of the PP, who mistrusted the strategy of imitating Vox.
He, however, never admitted that the party was divided between those who thought that approaching the discourse of the extreme right would stop the flight of votes, and those who were committed to doing just the opposite: underlining, also as an electoral trick, the differences, such as management experience.
He said the popular leader in January 2020 in a message addressed, above all, to his own: “Here there is no hard and soft PP;
hawks and doves.
There is only one PP”.
34:42
Pablo CASADO's full speech in which he announced the NO to the VOX motion of censure
In that complicated relationship with the regional barons there was a sweet moment: Casado's intervention in Vox's motion of censure against Pedro Sánchez in October 2020. They did not have enough support, and the movement only sought to make the PP uncomfortable.
The ballot was not easy and in fact, the party was not clear whether to abstain or vote with Vox on a motion that was going nowhere.
Casado kept the secret of his vote until the end and seemed to break definitively with Abascal: "This is as far as we've come," he told him from the Congress rostrum.
The critical sector applauded each of his verbal blows to Vox- "They wanted to cut off two ears of the PP and they have ended up as a monosage of Pablo Iglesias."
“His only contribution from him has been Vistalegre and a convertible bus” — and he reconciled with his leader.
Feijoo stated:
“It has forcefully demonstrated that the alternative to Sánchez and Iglesias cannot be led from rupture, populism or demagoguery.”
And the Andalusian president, Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla, celebrated: "It has been shown that Spain needs Pablo Casado as president."
But the honeymoon was just that: a honeymoon.
It started... and it's over.
Leaders and former leaders consulted agree that Casado is "a good person."
From there, those who have forced his departure point to dangerous friendships, alluding to García Egea.
Pablo Montesinos, deputy secretary and one of his last faithful, assures that he has been, above all, "very independent."
“He has not cared about confronting the CEOE, the Church [for pardons] or defending his ideas against the barons.
He has always acted out of conviction, and that is why today he has a clear conscience”.
Exclusive content for subscribers
read without limits
subscribe
I'm already a subscriber
