The number two of the PP, Teodoro García Egea, presented this Tuesday afternoon his resignation as general secretary of the party. Egea has been one of the protagonists of the crisis opened last Thursday after the accusation of the Madrid president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, that the national leadership of the conservative formation had prepared a dossier against her on account of a payment received by her brother for a contract with a mask supplier during the first wave of the pandemic.
“It has been a very difficult decision”, he pointed out tonight in an interview on La Sexta, his first public appearance after resigning, in which he has always referred to his team with Casado in the past tense; he has lamented that the Spanish “are not going to know the real Pablo Casado.”
“Being secretary general of a political party is being the bad guy in the movie, the most difficult thing there is,” he confessed. “Pablo Casado and I have spoken,” she said. “It was a personal decision,” he assured, denying pressure from his boss until now. García Egea explained that he has always been “loyal” to the people he works with and added that “I will always be loyal to Pablo Casado: he is one of the best people I have ever met: he is an honest and principled person ”. “I am leaving to facilitate the holding of a congress”, he specified.
Egea has lamented the image offered by certain “news and information” that, in his opinion, “have distorted the context.” And she has specifically mentioned the electoral returns of his party. “When the PP won in an important square, the victory belonged to the regional leader, and when the result was something worse, the fault was the national leadership.” After the meager results obtained by the PP in Castilla y León on 13F, with the sole gain of two prosecutors, criticism against Genoa has intensified.
Regarding the controversy over Ayuso and the contracting of the masks in which his brother intervened, he assures that he expected “to receive explanations” and has described as a “hoax” that it would have been La Moncloa who had provided them with sensitive information against the Madrid president. “These news are absolutely false” and only intend to “harm a leadership of the Popular Party.” He has categorically denied that it was a transaction with La Moncloa in exchange for unblocking the renewal of the Constitutional Court.
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“I believe the president of the Community of Madrid. And I think she is one of the greatest assets we have”, she has said in reference to one of her main opponents within the PP. She has refused to describe the serious internal crisis of her party, the greatest in recent years, as a “war” or “battle”. “The comfortable path would have been to ignore the information” that she received about Ayuso’s environment, she has acknowledged to explain her procedure.
An insufficient resignation
Casado offered several territorial barons the dismissal of Egea over the weekend, but in return he asked them to let him continue as party president until the ordinary congress, scheduled for July. But it was already late. The Galician president, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, told him that this was not enough, but that he also had to resign himself: “You have to resign now.” This Sunday, a demonstration of some 3,000 people in front of the Genoa headquarters called for Casado’s resignation. And, in the last few hours, Casado’s management committee, the nucleus of his faithful, and the majority of the leadership of the popular parliamentary group have been demanding Egea’s immediate resignation.
But Egea has at all times avoided criticizing his party for the way in which he has left the leadership, after an avalanche of support withdrawals by barons, regional and provincial leaders, deputies and senators pressured the president of the formation to summon the extraordinary congress. “You are never alone”, Egea responded to the question about when he and Married felt abandoned.
Before, he has raised: “Are we better today than when Pablo Casado arrived or worse?” He has asked about the PP and has been answered that it is better: “[El PP] it has a better territorial implantation, some renewed cadres in a very difficult territorial renewal”.
Last Thursday, the general secretary responded harshly to Ayuso at a press conference in which he described as “cruel and unfair” the way in which the Madrid president had referred to the party’s leadership. She “she has made very serious accusations, almost criminal. I could never imagine this reaction, something never seen in the history of our party; especially when we have supported her in her most lonely moments; when everyone attacked her, there was Pablo [Casado] to defend her. The president has always strongly supported her.” The general secretary pointed out that the origin of Ayuso’s diatribe was the differences between her and Genoa due to the advancement of the regional congress, to which the popular leader wanted to attend to take over the presidency.
Egea denied “bluntly and without reservation” that the party had contracted an investigation against Ayuso and detailed that the PP had received information about an alleged “charge of commissions”.
The party’s national leadership announced that same Thursday that an informative file had been opened on the case of the possible commission charged by the brother of the Madrid president, Tomás Díaz Ayuso. Just two days later, on Saturday, Casado told the president of Madrid that the data she had provided as an explanation for the hiring of her brother would be incorporated into the file opened against her to close it “satisfactorily.”
Teodoro García Egea (Cieza, Murcia, 37 years old), a PP member for 20 years, has been a deputy since 2011. Telecommunications engineer from the Polytechnic University of Cartagena, after which he studied Leadership Program for Public Management from IESE. At the XIX Extraordinary National Congress, in July 2018, he was appointed, at the proposal of Casado, general secretary of the conservative formation. On Wednesday night, Egea said that he and Casado arrived with the banner of “regeneration” to the PP and stressed that his until now boss was the first president of the PP to emerge from a primary.
Egea has starred in dialectical clashes with the second vice president of the Government, Yolanda Díaz, in the control sessions of the Government. Asked this Tuesday about the resignation of her adversary, Díaz has shown “absolute respect” for her, according to what she has said, “beyond our heated debates in the control sessions [al Gobierno] and our data crossings”. On TVE he has acknowledged that “it makes him sad, because my political culture is not used to things being done like this and this is a bit stark”, in addition to wishing him “the best of luck”.
This Wednesday there will no longer be a scuffle between Díaz and García Egea. “The best thing is that I do not attend the Congress of Deputies,” he said this Tuesday. The already former Secretary General had registered a question to the Executive, which in the end will not be formulated and will remain unanswered: “Do you consider that this Government adequately defends the rights of the self-employed?”
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