“Married has fallen for Teodoro, not for Isabel”

The leader of the PP, Pablo Casado, leaves Congress last Wednesday. Bruno Thevenin

Apparently, the operation to bring down Pablo Casado has lasted just seven days, the ones that have taken the tweets to turn around: from unconditional support... to having to go.

But in the overthrow of the first leader of the PP elected in a primaries, factors prior to the confrontation with Isabel Díaz Ayuso have been determining factors.

They are the ones that explain, for example, that Alberto Núñez Feijóo —May 29, 2020: “No colleague should lose their papers”— and Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo —June 2, 2020: “I understand that Feijóo does not like my interventions just as I don't like some of yours” – share, suddenly, diagnosis and remedy in the PP.

And they are, above all, the ones that reveal why Casado has been left so alone.

EL PAÍS has asked a dozen sources — former ministers, Marianists, Aznarists, leaders, former leaders,

The 'Ayuso case'.

"The straw that breaks the camel's back"

Supporters of Isabel Díaz Ayuso gathered last Sunday in front of the PP headquarters to demand the resignation of Pablo Casado and Teodoro García-Egea. Ricardo Rubio (Europa Press)

All the sources consulted place it as the trigger for the definitive crisis, not its exclusive or fundamental reason.

A regional president assures: “The person who has brought down Casado is Teodoro [García Egea], not Isabel [Díaz Ayuso].

Isabel has been the straw that breaks the camel's back.

That belligerent attitude with a president who is in a good mood caused a rupture that had never occurred before with the bases and the voters, but there was enormous prior discomfort.

A former leader critical of the Madrid president regrets the rallies last Sunday in front of Genoa demanding the resignation of Casado and his secretary general.

“It seems to me that there was a lot of green mask there,” he says, referring to supporters of Vox.

He then explains: "Ayuso and Miguel Ángel [Rodríguez, his chief of staff] knew they were going for her and Génova makes a fatal miscalculation: when the bomb explodes, his story is not credible because the week before the

[where Casado suggests that Ayuso has committed influence peddling] they were sending her to rallies in Castilla y León”.

A former minister: "If you believe what Casado said, you go to the Prosecutor's Office, not to the radio"

For José Manuel García-Margallo, former Minister of Foreign Affairs, the confrontation with Ayuso has more to do with "an absurd war of jealousy between two heavyweights" than with alleged irregularities.

“She has a spectacular success and the strategy of the management consists of saying that this success is not hers, that she starts in Murcia.

They call elections in Castilla y León to prove it and the campaign is Casado, but it doesn't work out.

The commission of her brother was not such, but the payment for services rendered.

And Casado himself recognizes it when the file is closed.

Another former minister of Mariano Rajoy points out: “We'll see what happens with Ayuso's contracts, but the matter was not addressed properly.

If you believe what Casado said, you go to the Prosecutor's Office, not to a radio station."

A member of the PP Steering Committee: "They wanted us to act as a human shield"

“We”, explains a member of the PP management committee, “we didn't know anything because they hadn't told us anything.

We have felt absolutely cheated and neglected.

On Thursday [after García Egea and Ayuso exchange reproaches] they explain to us that they have been doing this for months and that she had not provided them with the documentation they requested.

Several members of the Committee tell you that to denounce something like this, you need verified facts.

On Monday they insist on the issue, despite the fact that Casado had already accepted Ayuso's explanations as good, and there some of us stood up and said that decisions must be made because otherwise we will be co-participants in what they are doing.

They wanted us to act as a human shield, but I couldn't support that."

Another member of the management assures, however,

that "the mistake" was giving Ayuso "too much time" to provide the documentation they asked for.

"Meanwhile, Sol besieged us," he adds, alluding to Miguel Ángel Rodríguez.

The alleged espionage attempt, that is, the forms, buried the background.

No one in the party spoke publicly again of the benefit that Ayuso's brother obtained by contracting with his government in the worst of the pandemic.

Asked if this silence is due to the fact that they do not see anything less than exemplary in his performance, a regional president affirms: "We are used to a lot of cases being opened that then come to nothing, and in some cases, with the aforementioned dead.

Pablo [Casado] has not understood that the culture of the party is to protect its public officials from derision.

In the statutes it was introduced that no one is separated until the opening of the oral trial.

If a judge says that he is guilty, we will see, but that the party does not point it out ”.

García Egea and the blacklist

Pablo Casado (in the center) surrounded by his first supporters when presenting the guarantees to attend the PP primaries in 2018. Among them, Teodoro García Egea, Isabel Díaz Ayuso and Javier Maroto.

JJ Guillén (EFE)

The leaders and former leaders of the PP consulted believe that Casado would have been saved if García Egea, his right-hand man, had resigned on the first day of the crisis.

"I am absolutely convinced," says Esperanza Aguirre.

“I was excited about Casado.

He is an affable and principled person, but he had a general secretary taking care of party things who was just the opposite.”

"The Ayuso thing," says a former minister, "is not that it was an excuse, but rather a valve through which pressure that already existed has escaped."

The underlying issue, the sources consulted point out, was the general management of the party, that is, its general secretary.

The list of enemies of until this week

of the PP exceeds the number of corpses he has left in the party and is key in the end of Casado, who defended him until, in the words of those consulted, "it was too late".

One of the defenestrated relates it like this: “After the congress [in 2018, where Casado defeated Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría] they imposed a dynamic of conquest: those who had lost had to go.

They poured all their energies into changing the structures and Teodoro boasted of having a list with the names of those he was going to kill”.

Aguirre adds: “Teodoro mistook his mission.

Instead of letting the members choose the best, he insisted that they put the most manageable, whose salaries and careers depended entirely on him.

But when they have been given badly, they have also turned around.

That process of changing the structures was done, add the sources consulted, in bad ways.

And there coincide not only the defenestrated, but also some of those who placidly observed from their organic posts.

A regional baron describes it this way: “The interference has been constant, always imposing, always with arrogance and lack of respect.

And I know that in the parliamentary group Teo has done the same.

We asked Casado for changes a long time ago, but he has not wanted to make them”.

A former leader adds: “Teo threatened, blackmailed... it was something terrifying and he had those who are a little henchmen effectively terrified.

As soon as the yoke was removed [by spreading the demand for García Egea's resignation and the convening of an extraordinary congress] they betrayed them”.

One of those who fell in the Casado stage points out: “Leadership is not built on fear and domination.

That is not what achieves adhesions and the proof is that as soon as the matter begins to crack, people have left terrified”.

Not one more day.

I ask for the immediate dismissal of Teodoro García Egea and the urgent call for an Extraordinary Congress.

And I ask that we all join.

It is the end of an undesirable way of doing politics in the hands of a person who should never have been Secretary General of the PP.

pic.twitter.com/MnarU6JMi3

– Mario Garcés Sanagustín (@MarioGarcesSan) February 22, 2022

A former minister describes the turn of the PP leader's hard core as "pornographic".

“The espionage attempt is very ugly, but that rude abandonment of Casado by those who were there for him, like the rats that jump out of the ship first, has to do with the fact that he did not know how to build a solid leadership and in the first difficulty, there has been a stampede”.

The substitutes.

"They charged at once and to the beast, a generation"

That dynamic of "winners and losers" that several of those consulted indicate was imposed on the PP after the 2018 congress resulted in the departure of former ministers, former secretaries of state and veteran leaders from positions of responsibility and even politics. popular.

"He didn't have the best.

He pushed them away.

That was a kindergarten,” says Margallo.

He is not the only one who expresses himself in those terms.

“García Egea is a big boy”, affirms a regional president.

"He takes everything like a video game."

The former Minister of Foreign Affairs is pleased that the party is now betting “on the experience of Feijóo, a manager with a more centrist and European profile.

It was time for the PP to be a party, not a leadership”.

He is also celebrated by a fellow cabinet member: “Casado arrived announcing 'the return of the true PP'.

And we asked ourselves: 'But was he gone?'

Then, in effect, he left.

He was infected by what became so fashionable, the new politics.

Everything had to be new, that is, inexperienced.

Ayuso is not a manager either, a content policy.

Her success consists in the opposite, in her language.

The others had nothing else, but we did because we are a government party, a

[headhunter].

They never asked us and they said very general ideas because they did not know how to express them in another way.

Feijóo is a manager with experience and results who has been very critical of childishness in politics and many of those criticisms could be directed at his party.

Now the PP is back."

The arrival of Casado to the presidency of the party caused, according to one of the defenestrated, "a generational rupture."

“These replacements always need a transition so that those who know, those who have handled the affairs, transmit that knowledge.

Here a generation was eliminated like a beast and all at once”.

"The mouse was eating the cat"

The president of the Xunta de Galicia, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, when leaving, last Thursday, the meeting in Genoa where Casado resigned to appear at the next extraordinary congress of the PP.

Alberto Ortega - Europa Press (Europa Press)

"Why have even the most faithful, like Fernando López Miras [president of Murcia] turned their backs on him?", a baron asks himself when explaining what happened.

"Because his mayors and everyone wants to win and because he knows that the bases are no longer with Pablo, although he never understood it," he answers.

Several of those consulted share this diagnosis.

One of the sections by the Casado PP points out: “The final episode is indescribable and unpleasant, but beyond that the dynamic had no future.

He has been left alone because the mouse was eating the cat.

Vox does not stop rising.

Casado was the losing horse, panic spread and we entered an absurd phase of every man for himself.

Especially in Madrid, but also abroad, the idea spread that it was a burden.

It may be more or less fair, but so much dispersion of ideas, so much back and forth, so much feeling of lack of team... in the end it is transferred to the street”.

A former Rajoy minister agrees: “I am not surprised that they have abandoned him.

In politics the demand is very high and if there is a better candidate, more solid, with more chances of winning, they change.

It happens everywhere."

Another former leader points out that García Egea's desire to counteract the weight of the barons coincided at the time when he began to think that Casado might need a fourth attempt to occupy La Moncloa.

“We all understood that the next elections were the last ones and if he did not manage to govern, he would go home.

But Teo began to say that the 2019 electoral repetition could not be counted as two elections, but as one, and that Casado, like his predecessors, was entitled to three attempts.”

A person from Casado's environment remembers, however, that he had come back in the polls and assures that some gave them "up to 130 seats" Now, he laments, "a Vox sorpasso is possible."

Feijóo, and all those consulted also agree on this, it will not be easy: his first decision may be whether the extreme right enters a government thanks to its acronym or if the elections in Castilla y León are repeated.

Exclusive content for subscribers

read without limits

subscribe

I'm already a subscriber