the history of the general secretaries of the Popular Party

ten years before People’s Alliance (PA) was refounded in a congress and was renamed as People’s Partyits president and founder, Manuel Fragawas the first to occupy another position: that of general secretary of the match. The Galician politician thus inaugurated a position for which they have passed nine men and two womentwo of them with ten-year terms -and Maria Dolores de Cospedal– and two others who barely lived to be a year old: Mariano Rajoy Y Alberto Ruiz-Gallardon, the latter on an interim basis. Cuca Gamarra now makes her debut in a potentially incendiary chair that has often been tainted by party corruption. Although half of those who have held it have even reached the Government, others were forced to leave their posts.

The last general secretary of the PP is an example of this. At only 37 years old, Teodoro Garcia Egea became the ‘villain‘ of a match in which it was almighty and that he has settled one of his bloodiest internal crises, claiming his head and that of the leader who raised him to the top. Barely two months after resigning, his political life takes place between his office and his seat in the fourth row of Congress.

Aegean is, together with George Verstrynge, the only one whose tenure as the general secretary of the PP has not served to boost his political career, quite the contrary. Verstrynge, perhaps the most controversial of those who have held the position, was dismissed by Manuel Fraga, the same one who in 1979 chose him as his number two. After a summer vacation, Fraga deposed Verstrynge to quell the rebellion that was beginning to take shape in the party, and put in his place a very young Alberto Ruiz-Gallardon interim.

According to what he said, the dismissal had to do with a “necessary full identity of ideas between the president of a party and its general secretary & rdquor ;. And that, at that time, Verstrynge had not yet embarked on the ideological journey that would make him a founding adviser to Podemos and the belligerent left-wing talk show host he is today. Verstrynge left Alianza Popular just a month after his dismissal. And he has not been the only one.

Another of the former general secretaries of the PP tore up his membership card years after leaving office. Francisco Alvarez-Cascoswho due to his character and manners were nicknamed the “general secretary & rdquor ;, he was ten years number two of José María Aznar. In 1998 he asked to be relieved of that “hard and thankless” function, although he continued to be part of the executive committee.

At that time he was already first vice-president and minister of the Presidency, and between 2000 and 2004 he held the Development portfolio, marked by the management of the disaster of the ‘Prestige’. He disappeared for a few years, stripped of any organic position, and in 2010 he reappeared in the political arena to be a candidate for the presidency of the Principality of Asturias. He did not obtain the support of Genoa and set up his own party, Foro Asturias, with which he managed to be president for a year -they knocked down his budgets and his government fell- and from which he ended up being expelled in 2020 between accusations of crimes of unfair administration and misappropriation.

Cascos was also splashed by the party corruption cases and had to testify as a witness in the case of box B of the PP. He was not the only one. Javier Arenas, Ángel Acebes, Mariano Rajoy and María Dolores de Cospedal gave an account of how much they knew -or rather, claimed not to know- of the alleged irregular financing of the party.

Years before, when the PP was still AP and its president Antonio Hernandez Manchahis right hand was Arturo Garcia Tizon, later chosen to succeed Gallardón. García Tizón was one of the few men of the old guard who survived the refoundation of the party. He temporarily returned to the legal profession, but in the year 2000 José María Aznar rewarded him by appointing him State Attorney General. He was president of the Diputación de Toledo during the Cospedal era in the community, between 2011 and 2015. He supported Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría in the party’s primaries held in 2018 and a year later he announced that he was leaving politics.

Of the eleven general secretaries that the PP has had, four are from Madrid. Cospedal grew up in Albacete and Álvarez Cascos in Asturias. There is two Galicians -Fraga and Rajoy- one born in Tangier (Morocco) -Verstrynge-, one from Murcia -García Egea- one from Avila -Acebes- and one from Andalusia: Javier Arenas.

The latter was in office between 1999 and 2003, when he gave way to Mariano Rajoy, who was to become the candidate for the Presidency of the Government after the “finger” by Aznar. As a reward, he went on to occupy the vice-presidency of the Aznar government. Since then he has always remained close to organic power, until Pablo Casado stripped him for the first time in 28 years. He is now a senator. Rajoy is the one who has been in the general secretariat for the shortest time, with the permission of Gallardón’s five-month interim.

Already as president, Rajoy chose Acebes as his number two in 2004. Four years later, after the elections, the man from Avila left the office of Génova 13: “The responsibility he had had for four years has been fulfilled, and therefore I have told him not to count on me for the new stage& rdquor ;, he declared then. In 2011 he left his seat and starred in one of those revolving doors from the public sector to the private company, signing for Iberdrola, where he continues after the period in which, accused of the Bankia case, he left the electricity company.

The record of stay in the general secretariat of the PP is held by the first woman to occupy it. Maria Dolores de Cospedal he spent a decade being Rajoy’s right hand man. She was almost everything at the same time: deputy, defense minister, general secretary of the PP and president of the party in Castilla-La Mancha. And although her dismissal from her position was natural after Rajoy’s fall in the motion of censure, she left the party through the back door cornered by the audios of former commissioner Villarejo. She left her seat and party a few months after running for primaries in which she lost, but she gave decisive support to Paul Married: “I never thought I would do it in such an environment & rdquor ;, he wrote in his farewell.