Isabel Díaz Ayuso made her intentions very clear to Alberto Núñez Feijóo in March 2022. She was already president of Madrid, and he toured Spain before assuming the leadership of the national PP after the defenestration of Pablo Casado. “We are a national message at the service of Spain,” Ayuso snapped in front of Feijóo. And he added that the Madrid PP is “a team that has little patience for nonsense, little endurance for impositions.” Not three years have passed and Ayuso has already disavowed his supposed leader on many occasions.
The last one, this week, already tells of Pedro Sánchez’s round of meetings with the regional presidents. Feijóo said in public at the beginning of September that it would be “a mistake” not to attend the event, and added: “President Ayuso knows very well that her responsibility is to defend the interests of the people of Madrid and practice state policy, and that is what he has always been doing.” A couple of days before, Ayuso raised, also in public, a generalized proposal from the entire PP to the President of the Government.
In the end, all the presidents of the PP will go to Moncloa. All, except Ayuso, who announced yesterday his unilateral plan for Sánchez. Feijóo’s team assured on Monday that he maintained his position, that is, that he considered the decision a “mistake.” But this Tuesday, the leader of the PP has not been able to escape from the press as he intended and has slipped in a laconic “how can I not support her?” to questions from journalists.
Like him, the rest of the PP barons have sent messages of support in public, despite the fact that she has insisted in an interview in Cope that “many times” she has made “decisions alone, sometimes against the grain, because she thought that “It was the best and that is what happens in this case.” “I don’t want to be part of that photo of normality,” he added, which means that the other 13 regional leaders who are going to go, or have already gone, to Moncloa, do want to be.
But Ayuso’s insults to Feijóo began already in 2022. The Galician leader landed in Madrid with his popularity skyrocketing and his hands free to play a game as he pleased. The barons turned to the most experienced of them, the one who had won four absolute majorities, to beat Pedro Sánchez. Feijóo chose his first direction at will, and left out Ayuso’s people, who left that extraordinary congress in Seville visibly angry.
It didn’t happen again. At the return of the summer of 2022, the aura of unbeatable abandonment of Feijóo. And the internal problems began, with Ayuso’s disavowals as the weakest flank.
Abortion of minors
That same month of September 2022, Ayuso distanced herself from the central thesis of the PP on one of the key ideological issues: abortion. The president of Madrid, who had just taken over the leadership of the PP in the region, defended that minors aged 16 and 17 could terminate their pregnancies voluntarily without authorization from their legal guardians.
In January 2023, Feijóo settled the controversy with a change in the PP’s historical position, although without daring to submit it to a congressional vote. The PP went on to defend the deadline law after 12 years of appeals before the Constitutional Court, perhaps because they already knew that the guarantee court was about to rule in favor.
CGPJ
Before the end of 2022, Ayuso twisted Feijóo’s arm again. The PP closed an agreement with the Government to renew the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ). But the president of Madrid contacted Feijóo to show her opposition to the agreement. And the national leadership of the PP gave in to pressure.
Those from Feijóo later alleged that the Government had deceived them with the sedition and embezzlement reform and that, for this reason, they had broken the agreement. But the modification of the Penal Code had been negotiated in parallel to the new CGPJ and was only relevant after the call from Ayuso, who was later joined by Juan Manuel Moreno.
Feijóo learned the lesson and, already in 2024, carried out the negotiations to renew the governing body of the judges very secretly. Only when it was closed and signed did the leader of the PP notify his regional barons. Ayuso was not even in Spain.
Negotiating with the PSOE is “newbies”
The rejection of the pact by the CGPJ can be extended to any negotiation of the PP with the PSOE or the Government. In August 2023, at the start of the political course, Ayuso blurted out in front of Feijóo: “Let’s open our eyes. The social base of the PSOE has changed. It is no longer the equality that they have used so much. We do not realize it, we call in a naïve way to a party whose principles have vanished, some supposed socialist values no longer exist.”
Ayuso thus described his leader as inexperienced just one day after Feijóo offered the PSOE an agreement to agree on a two-year government program if they made him president after his insufficient victory at the polls on July 23.
The photo with Junts
Feijóo’s victory on June 23 was a mirage. It was soon seen that parliamentary arithmetic was not favorable for the PP, which needed, no matter what, the support of Vox, but also that of the PNV or Junts. The PP tried to attract the PNV, which refused from the first moment. In public and in private. The electoral competition with EH Bildu made it impossible to join the Basque nationalists with Vox.
The conversations with Junts were more discreet and in them options such as amnesty, which the PP rejected, or pardons for Carles Puigdemont and his followers were put on the table, as revealed by a senior party official months later. Those secret negotiations did not come to light, but a public meeting between the general secretary, Cuca Gamarra, and the Junts group did. Although the national leadership tried to present the meeting as a courtesy to all groups, the most ultra sector of the PP rebelled against the meeting through the mouth of the then leader in Catalonia, Alejandro Fernández.
Ayuso remained silent but, a year later, he has poured cold water on the speculation of an instrumental motion of censure with Vox and Junts to oust Pedro Sánchez and go to elections that some on the right suspect: “I would never agree with Junts a motion against Sánchez, they are not trustworthy.”
Alejandro Fernández to power
The purge of the leader of the PP of Catalonia was another direct confrontation between Feijóo and his toughest sector. The national leader was clear that with Alejandro Fernández as a candidate his options for recovering the capacity for political, economic and social dialogue in Catalonia would be, at best, very difficult and limited.
Feijóo tried for months to apply against Fernández an old strategy inherited from other illustrious leaders from the Galician PP: let the problem solve itself. He did it in Euskadi where, without public noise, he managed to make Carlos Iturgaiz understand that he was not the desired candidate and take a step back to hand over to Javier de Andrés.
But Alejandro Fernández had the direct support of Isabel Díaz Ayuso, Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo and even former leaders such as José María Aznar and Esperanza Aguirre. Feijóo avoided the public anger and assumed his inability to move the chair. The PP rose to 15 deputies and surpassed Vox, but it did not manage to defund them or become key to governability.
Four-day work week
Ayuso’s penultimate insult towards Feijóo has attacked the new strategy that the PP has tried to launch at the return of the summer to focus its opposition action on issues close to people’s real lives, such as housing or family conciliation. .
The first of the milestones was, precisely, a bill that includes the PP’s measures to enter into a debate that has a lot of impact, especially among younger people: the combination of personal life with work.
Outside of the law, Feijóo also floated the idea of supporting some type of mechanism that would allow, without reducing the working day, to work four days a week. That is, accumulating hours or managing time in a more “flexible” way. Of course, always within the framework of collective bargaining, without harming “productivity” and without turning it into law. At the service of the company.
Even so, the Ayuso Government came out to show its rejection of a measure that, in fact, is already possible and is practiced in many companies. “We, at this moment and as the Community Government, are totally against what could be the reduction of a working day,” said the spokesperson for the regional Executive, expressly asked about the idea launched by Feijóo.
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