The story of Pablo Casado at the head of the PP began at a wedding and is on the way to becoming a funeral. The wedding was restricted and was held 15 days after the victory of the motion of censure for the conviction of corruption that brought down Mariano Rajoy’s team. José Antonio Bermúdez de Castro, veteran general secretary of the PP in Congress, got married, and the link, which coincided with a match between the Spanish soccer team against Portugal, was attended by almost the entire PP, including Rajoy. Only the Galician Alberto Núñez Feijóo was missing. In those days, the first weeks of June 2018, the uncertain succession of Rajoy was at stake. A month later, in the express congress of the primaries, Casado took the victory by surprise and handed over all his power in the party apparatus from the beginning to a novice but very ambitious deputy: Teodoro García Egea.
At a table of the marriage event, former Vice President Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, and favorite candidate, chatted with her large team of ministers and senior officials. In another, people from the apparatus surrounded the former secretary general, Dolores de Cospedal, her great rival. In a third, more secluded, a young Casado sat down with the mayor of Boadilla, Antonio González Terol, who officiated the link, with Egea, and other young puppies whom he then coordinated as head of the party “to break their faces in the sets” and the gatherings in defense of a very worn-out Executive. There a friendship, a team and a chain were forged.
In that celebration, between football, dinner and the subsequent dance, groups of interests began to form. Nobody was betting a penny at that time on Casado’s third-way candidacy, not even in his direct environment, who saw it as unfeasible due to lack of experience. Except for his friend Egea, whom he hadn’t known long ago, but with whom he had established a good relationship during that complicated legislature in Congress.
Jorge Moragas, the chief of staff at La Moncloa de Rajoy, had verified that the most ardent ministers of the Government hardly wanted to expose themselves in the media and ordered the young Deputy Secretary of Communication, Pablo Casado, to look for ardent warriors willing to fight at any media trench. Egea was always an obedient volunteer.
When Casado won the congress, with that fresher and newer speech than his opponents, Egea and Ángel Carromero, his longtime friend and collaborator at Nuevas Generaciones de Madrid, were key to adding votes and support. Carromero, now resigned in one of the aftermath of the scandal for his alleged involvement from his position as coordinator of the Madrid mayor’s office in the attempt to hire spies to look for evidence against Isabel Díaz Ayuso, Casado always had him as his expert in what in the PP they call it “special operations”. Egea relieved Carromero in that function, but already from the enormous power that the general secretary of the party grants in the PP.
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The PP parliamentary spokesperson that Casado went to sign as a great banner of the cultural battle that he wanted to play against the left, Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, suffered his stakes since she was appointed. In her book, Politically Undesirable, Álvarez de Toledo portrays not only Egea as a “bulldozer” willing to “limit as much as possible” her “autonomy, influence, and room for maneuver.” He also reveals a meeting at the Wellington Hotel in Madrid to quell that friendly fire, to which Egea introduced herself with a smile. And he concludes: “In two minutes I verified that the Profident and the dagger are compatible.”
In that volume of his memoirs, Álvarez de Toledo assures that Casado confessed to him that he had handed over all the organic power to Egea. And the still deputy, now a bastion of the critical sector, takes the opportunity to settle accounts with her ex-friend Married her, from whom she has demanded her resignation these days as much as that of Egea. She calls him from “sentimental chameleon”, to “welcome” or “vane”. And she laments that she can both “fear” her and the obsession “to please” everyone all the time.
That reproach from Álvarez de Toledo to Egea about his meddling in appointments and in the availability of all kinds of resources for the party apparatus has been transmitted to Casado by such important barons as the Andalusian Juan Manuel Moreno and the president of Castilla y León, Alfonso Fernandez Manueco. The Andalusian, directly, stood up to Egea at the PP congress in Seville, for how he acted so that his candidate won. Mañueco also criticized him for his interference in appointing party presidents in one of his provinces, such as León. The popular leader had entrusted Egea, as soon as he won the congress, to renew the structures of the PP to turn the page on the past and above all to prepare the apparatus in his favor in the event of new electoral defeats.
These interferences have raised welts in the PP throughout Spain. Casado has heard these internal complaints against Egea, during these three and a half years, but has not acted.
In the crisis with Ayuso, which in theory began due to Egea’s misgivings about also handing over the power of the Madrid PP to the president of the Community, Casado believed the arguments and accusations that his number two had been administering to him since the summer. It was Egea that received the leak from a high-ranking national official about the alleged commission that Ayuso’s brother would have received for the purchase of a batch of masks at the worst moment of the pandemic. But without definitive proof.
The Married-Egean tandem understood, however, that they had caught her. They summoned her to her offices, in separate bilateral and secret meetings, and depending on Ayuso’s environment they posed the dilemma: either you give up accumulating more power or we get the scandal out. Ayuso stays in the battle and in charge of him. Casado and Egea have led the PP to the greatest crisis in its history.
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