The impact of the decision Alberto Nunez Feijoo to suspend negotiations with the government to renew the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) has been an earthquake for the PP internally, despite the public support that barons, leaders, mayors and deputies have given these days to their leader. In conversations with a dozen of them, EL PERIÓDICO DE CATALUNYA has been able to hear almost the same question in two very different senses: “For this they killed Pablo Casado?”. The construction of Feijóo’s leadership has been compromised both for those who want him with a tough profile and for those who prefer him more moderate. The dilemma that Casado suffered is now being experienced by his successor.
One of the leaders closest to the Galician politician admitted to this newspaper on Friday that the pressure from the media and from some conservative judges that the leader of the PP and Esteban Gonzalez Pons his negotiator, they had been suffering for days, was so powerful that he had to end up giving in and breaking up with Pedro Sanchez. This baron, and in this he coincides with the central government, considers that the Galician politician has missed an opportunity to bang on the table before “the Madrid ecosystem” and stand up like a statesman. “He has ended up doing what Pablo did, blocking… Is this why we killed him?” He lamented.
The dilemma that Casado suffered is now being experienced by his successor: do you have to have a hard or moderate profile?
In fact, at the Seville congress where he was elected by acclamation, Feijóo dedicated his main speech to promising a moderate opposition that could facilitate state pacts. His divorce with Sánchez (and his affirmation that he will not agree on anything else this legislature with the socialist leader) complicates the profile that he himself is selling since he came to his post as president of the PP. “We have put on a tray to the left that Feijóo his legs trembled at first and that we are an anti-system party because we continue not to comply with the Constitution”, points out a PP deputy.
“Galician voucher”
But that question “Is this why they killed Casado?” It has also been raised by two people who were among the last to abandon the former party leader when he tried to resist last February. These two consulted sources consider that Feijóo has “swallowed” for “too many days” the public debate on the reform of the crime of sedition and the will of Sánchez to reform it to reduce prison sentences. “Is this why they killed Casado? To sow the ideological apathy and politics in the PP?” asks one of the interlocutors. “It’s worth Galician”, he continues. In this sector of the party they consider that it takes more toll on Feijóo to sit down to negotiate with the chief executive of the CGPJ, whose mandate has expired for almost four years, than not doing so. The same philosophy that the previous leader of the PP maintained for three years.
And, things in life, it is also the one defended by Isabel Díaz Ayuso that, like in February, when he did clamp with Feijóo to throw out Casado, he has had a capital paper in the resolution of this decision of Feijóo. The president of the Community of Madrid asked the leader of her party on Thursday morning that she get up from the negotiating table, because that pact, with Sánchez committing to reform the crime of seditionwas going to take its toll on the PP at the polls.
That conversation between the two came hours after Feijóo and the team with which landed in Madrid six months ago they will start to check the iimpact that some conservative media they have in their ranks. Casado suffered it in his fall. In this case, both in the Government, which he has had in the Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolanosto their negotiator from the judiciary, as in the PP, they admit that some articles and the interventions of some opinion leaders led Feijóo to rethink the position he had established of disassociating the renewal of the CGPJ from the debate on sedition.
And they specify some of the messages that made the most dent: the ‘El Confidencial’ survey entitled “Sánchez cuts the PP’s advantage in half in two weeks: the ‘Feijóo effect’ is diluted“; an article on that website by Rubén Amón titled Is Núñez Feijóo a bluff?; the intervention of Federico Jiménez losantoson EsRadio, saying that he did not know if Feijóo “he’s going to become president”and the cover of ‘El Mundo’ which opened with the headline “The PP fears the reaction of “the political, judicial and media right”.
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Until that day, Thursday, Feijóo seemed not to fear any reaction, since, with Vox immersed in an internal crisis, he had decided to agree on the CGPJ with Sánchez. Almost everything was done, according to Bolaños and Pons. And the president of the conservatives had been asking his supporters for more than a week (and they all did so in public except Ayuso) to insist on delink sedition from the judiciary. On Thursday, however, he began to relate and announced the breakup.
Feijóo thus resolved his first relevant dilemma at the head of the PP. More will come and with them he will have to forge a leadership that has now been called into question.