The Diplomat
The president of the PP, Pablo Casado, concluded his tour of four countries in the South American cone yesterday in Chile, proposing the creation of an Ibero-American Popular Party, “in line” with the European People’s Party (EPP).
Casado, who has visited Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Chile, has insisted in all his stops on the need to form an “Alliance for Freedom” that brings together in the same space “all moderate and centrist thought against populism”. The idea was put forward by the leader of the PP to the presidents of Uruguay, Paraguay and Chile, but not to the president of Argentina, Alberto Fernández, with whom he did not meet, and who is far removed from the PP.
Yesterday, in his meeting with the Chilean President, Sebastián Piñera, he proposed, specifically, the creation of an Ibero-American Popular Party, following the model of the EPP, with the aim of defending the principles “with respect to other initiatives such as the Puebla Group that whitewashes dictatorial regimes”, as he explained.
After his meeting with Piñera, Casado said on his Twitter account that the Ibero-American Popular Party would defend “the values of democracy, freedom, prosperity, welfare and security”.
After his meeting with Piñera, Casado stressed that they both share the importance of defending the values of “freedom and the fight for democracy and the market economy”, and congratulated Chile on how it has fought against the pandemic, which places the country “well above the average in the area”, both in the management of COVID-19 and in economic growth, at 12 percent.
On the other hand, the leader of the Popular Party praised the words of King Felipe VI during the 70th anniversary of the Association of Spanish Language Academies when he spoke of the “common language as a language spoken by 600 million people in the world, the second most taught language in the world, and also with an economic wealth for the independent Latin American republics”.
“Bad ideas have bad results”, he said, referring to the policies of the left in Spain, and gave as an example the last three OECD reports which, in his words, reflect that “taxes have risen the most during the pandemic, the pension system is at risk and Spain will be the nation that takes the longest to recover after the pandemic”.
“It is no coincidence that Italy and France are doing better and Spain, with a socialist and communist government, has the worst figures,” he said.
On his tour of the South American cone, Casado also defended, as the United States has already proposed, extending the Atlantic Alliance to countries such as Australia, but he also added others, such as Japan, Israel and Chile, pointing out that “NATO is a Western concept of defending human rights”.
