It seemed like a perfect plan, or at least the least bad of all possible plans. When Pablo Casado was elected general secretary of the PP in the July 2018 Congress, the party breathed between relieved and hopeful: seven weeks after abandoning power at the point of a motion of censure, they could present a candidate who inspired both sympathy and fidelity to the founding principles of political formation, renewal and early Aznarism , expectations of the future and peace with the past. And his beardless face It allowed him to compete in freshness and enthusiasm with the great threat that was flying over the offices of Genoa 13 at that time: Albert Rivera and his Citizensdesignated as the unstoppable relief at the head of the Spanish center-right.
We no longer remember, but in those days Vox were four fans who distributed pamphlets on the unity of Spain on the corners of the Salamanca district of Madrid. Time passes very quickly in Spanish political life, or perhaps too many things happen in a very short time. So many that today it is hard to recognize how convenient the ‘married bet’. Politically suckled at the breasts of Hope Aguirrewhich gave him his first public position as Madrid regional deputy in 2007, a decade later the new president of the party retained the imprint of the promising youngsters calls to make history.
New generations
He had joined the PP in 2004, the year of the popular debacle against Zapatero, and a few months later he was at the head of the New Generations of Madrid, who was like being the captain of ‘la Masía’ in the match. The appearance of the ideal son-in-law of him and his skills as a speaker capable of dominating a lectern without the need for papers did not escape the eye of Rajoywhich took him to the Congress of Deputies in 2011 and four years later commissioned him to give the PP a voice and a face as vice president of communication.
His double degree in Law and Business was clouded by suspicions of deal favor -he never came to clarify how he was able to pass the last 12 subjects of the degree in four months and get a master’s degree from Harvard University without leaving Aravaca-, but above all it seemed a guy with a future aheadwhich is the nail that the PP of 2018 needed to cling to.
Son of a doctor and a university professor from Palenciathe city where he was born in 1981, married to a psychologist and father of two girls, from a middle-class background with a good family, could easily be perceived by the Spanish sociological centre-right as “one of ours”. If his only faults were youth and lack of experience, time and a good beard could take care of correcting those defects.
What came after is the story of a character who seeks his place in the world and cannot find it due to his own shortcomings and the mutant character of that world, which in these three and a half years has not stopped offering unexpected plot twists without him ever knowing how to get the hang of it.
Vox and Ayuso
The first scare took him soon: five months after taking the helm of the PP, Vox broke into the Andalusian regional elections with unexpected force and opened a hole in the party on its right flank for which it has not stopped enter water and leave voters in the successive electoral appointments.
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Since then, Casado maintains a schizophrenic relationship with the extreme right that has ended up showing him as a deranged being, and deranged his followers. The same leader who invested himself with Churchill and sang the forty to Abascal in the motion of censure of October 2020immediately afterwards he dedicated himself to whipping the Government with the coarsest and thickest brush strokes that have been seen and heard in Congress, or crowed the same Vox speech on a background of cows in the recent elections in Castilla y León.
But the greatest proof of his derangement It has been her way of managing her greatest success: the election of a candidate for the regional elections in Madrid in 2019. If Aguirre was disappointed by the councilors, Casado Ayuso turned out to be a princess. From the town, to be exact, with permission from Belén Esteban. The overwhelming success of the Madrid president in the 2021 elections allowed the popular to think again about Moncloa without melancholy, but the leader’s clumsiness when it comes to taking advantage of his greatest political treasure has ended up frustrating his future. Precisely he, who had arrived with the whole future ahead of him, as young promises arrive.