Ángel Collado
At the worst moment of internal division in the government, the opposition, the PP, has got into its own crisis of egos and personal jealousy, which is pitting the national leadership against the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso.
While Pedro Sánchez consolidates his parliamentary majority of leftists and pro-independence supporters to push through the State Budget, Pablo Casado clashes with the party’s leading figure at the polls over control of the organisation in his electoral fiefdom in Madrid.
The open fight between the leadership teams of Casado and Ayuso is a gift to Sánchez that has already halted the rise of the PP in the polls that will be published in the coming days and which all sectors of the party are astounded by. From the outset, the fight has obscured the work of the opposition in the first stage of the Budget, a personal success for the President of the Government when it comes to satisfying his secessionist allies, from ERC to Bildu.
After pardoning Oriol Junqueras and others responsible for the attempted coup in Catalonia and approving penitentiary benefits for ETA terrorists, Sánchez continues to pay the bills presented by the representatives of both parties in the budget process. Moreover, the accounts are “false” and a sure aggravation of the economic crisis. That is what the head of the opposition in Congress denounces, but the focus of attention in his party has shifted to the spectacle of internal disunity it offers.
The war is incomprehensible to the party’s own militants, as well as being particularly counterproductive for Casado and the PP’s most immediate objectives: to wear down Sánchez’s government and prepare for the more than foreseeable early regional elections in Andalusia.
Ayuso, Casado’s personal bet as a candidate in the 2019 regional elections, confirmed herself as the PP’s revelation in last May’s elections by sweeping the left. She made the most of her particular clash with Sánchez and in the defence of Madrid, she grouped the vote of the entire centre-right and stopped Vox. Now he claims the same powers as the rest of the regional presidents of the Partido Popular: control of the regional organisation’s apparatus.
Faced with such conventional aspirations, at PP headquarters in Genova they have gone from discussing the date of the congress that should elect the president to recognising that they do not want Ayuso to reach the position that her predecessors Esperanza Aguirre and Cristina Cifuentes did. They are even threatening to launch an alternative candidacy headed by the other emerging figure of the Popular Party: the mayor of the capital José Luis Martínez-Almeida.
The party’s veterans are trying to make Casado’s team see that opening this war or keeping the conflict lurking for the next few months until a regional congress is held means bleeding the PP dry.
Although at first the conflict was blamed on the respective teams of the national president and the regional president, the events and leaks of the last few days show that the secretary general, Teodoro García Egea, is not going it alone in his confrontation with the new ‘leader’ of Madrid.
Casado avoids referring to a clash that questions his authority in any case, while the idea spreads that he wants to stop Ayuso’s rise in case he ends up disputing her position in a national congress.
The leaders and parliamentarians of the PP outside the fight are entrusting themselves to the efforts of the other heavyweights of the party, the barons, so that Genova respects the legitimate aspirations of the president of the Community of Madrid.
The president of the Xunta de Galicia, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, was the first to point out that he could not understand the rejection of Ayuso as president of the Madrid PP. Juan Manuel Moreno, president of the Junta de Andalucía, is of the same opinion and stresses the damage caused to the whole party by the image of division. He would be the first to be affected by the crisis in his party, as he has to decide whether to call the regional elections for the beginning of next year.
