Ángel Collado
The PP has resolved without civil war the first phase of its internal crisis, the urgent departure of Pablo Casado from the leadership after his last electoral fiasco in Castilla y León plus the disaster of his operation against Isabel Díaz Ayuso.
The spectacle of self-destruction of the main and only governing party in the opposition did not lead to a battle of sides because in the end its president was left alone, with no support other than that of his cabinet team.
The leader with the most internal authority in the PP, the president of the Xunta de Galicia, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, is already preparing to reorganise the party with all the sectors that entered the fray in the 2018 Congress, from which Casado was elected as Mariano Rajoy’s successor.
In less than a week, the PP has returned to June 2018, when Pedro Sánchez took power by means of a motion of censure agreed with all the extreme left and the separatist and nationalist groups of the parliamentary arc. With Rajoy’s departure from the Government and his resignation as party president, the majority of the apparatus first looked towards Galicia, but with Feijóo’s resignation as successor, it was later divided into three camps: the one that supported Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, the opposition of María Dolores de Cospedal, who came out to stop the former vice-president of the Government, and that of the new generations of the PP, the party’s “interns”, headed by Pablo Casado.
The candidate with the least experience and team knew how to take advantage of the clash between his rivals and succeeded in offering an image of internal renewal that gave him the presidency of the party at the July congress. Between the PP’s own presidentialism and discipline, Casado’s mandate had passed without internal dissidence, at least in public, until the black week for its president that followed the very short victory in Castilla y León.
The party has not been divided into camps, for or against Casado, because as it turned out, the president had no supporters beyond his secretary general, Teodoro García Egea, and the members of his cabinet. Outside that circle, and even among the early ‘Casadistas’, all were doubts about the strategic decisions and the appointment policy of the leader.
It is no coincidence that, among Casado’s unconditional supporters, the three leaders who have followed him to the end, none of them had a career in the PP prior to the last stage. For most of the members of the leadership (seven out of ten, including deputy secretaries and parliamentary spokespersons) it was clear that the electoral failures and the operation against Ayuso required resignations, rather than the numb defences of those responsible.
The first moves of the main PP leader with internal authority to channel the crisis, Núñez Feijóo, reveal what his supporters were when the old guard of the apparatus offered themselves so that he could succeed Rajoy in July 2018. MEP Esteban González Pons, former number three in the organisation under Rajoy, and the current spokesperson of the Popular Group in Congress and former mayoress of Logroño, Cuca Gamarra, have been chosen to lead the vacuum that is now opening up until the congress scheduled for April.
The veteran leaders, with long previous political careers in the party and experience in public management, will regain control of the PP in four weeks. Feijoó will try to stitch up the wounds left by Casado’s period without having to deal with a Casadoist sector that is now confirmed to have never existed beyond the circle of “interns” that the president himself, Egea and his signings surrounded themselves with.
González Pons took refuge in Brussels and in the second line, because after betting on Feijóo he did not fit in with any of the sectors in contention for Rajoy’s succession. Gamarra (a former ‘Sorayista’) as parliamentary spokesperson in Congress was a last-minute move by Casado to avoid the internal and image problems generated by another of his star signings: Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo.
At the same time, the president of the Xunta is guaranteed continuity within the leadership with the explicit support of the current members with a more ‘Marianist’ past: the former president of Congress Ana Pastor and the former ministers Dolors Montserrat and Elvira Rodríguez. And to finish off the objective of recovering the unity of the PP and erasing the last stage Feijóo will incorporate other ex-ministers and ex-leaders from the Rajoy era.
In the end, of the new generation that skipped the entire hierarchical ladder in the Partido Popular in 2018, the only figure that remains is the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso. The only one who, from being a “intern”, was able to become a first-line leader through management and personal drive, so much so that Casado dug his own grave in the campaign to stop her.
