On July 29, when Vox announced an undated motion of censure to President Pedro Sánchez , the leader of the PP, Pablo Casado, already sensed with his followers that it could represent an opportunity and a risk. Its number two , Teodoro García-Egea, despised it from the start, but until Thursday the party did not clarify whether it would vote no or abstain. In Casado’s team they assure that the break-up speech with Vox and Santiago Abascal this Thursday is a “turning point” and that everything obeys a highly planned strategy and that a “new stage” begins.
The leadership of the PP did not want to convene, as it usually does, its parliamentary group to consult or debate the position to be maintained in the debate on Vox’s vote of no confidence. Casado’s team did not want previous internal fights that would divert the focus they intend to fix on the mismanagement of the Government in the second wave of the coronavirus and because, they say, the popular leader had a plan on the motion from the beginning that he could not and should not to reveal. The meeting finally took place on Thursday afternoon, after the debate, with Casado very pleased by the reaction to his intervention and with the majority of the group “euphoric”, “exultant” and “very excited” by some messages that had been going on for so long. yearning for.
At the meeting of the Popular Group of Congress, eight speeches were held this Thursday. In all of them, including that of the exporter, Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, the level and good oratory built by the leader were praised. Álvarez de Toledo, yes, regretted what he called “unfair ad hominem challenge ” against Abascal and the “blowing up of bridges with Vox voters.” She would have voted to abstain, but assumed the discipline of voting, although she again warned of the danger of the lack of freedom of expression of the dissenters as in the sects. It was the only blur that Casado heard. The rest were praise and the verification by those present that “the leader has consolidated himself in the space of the moderate and liberal center that should correspond to the PP.”
That was the message that the former president of Congress, the popular Ana Pastor, emphatically conveyed, who even contested the intervention of another bench comrade who attributed that merit to the usual PP. Pastor pointed out that what he has to do now is prop up the leader. And he added, according to several deputies present: “We are very proud of the speech you have made because the PP is just what we are, a reformist, focused and liberal party.” The current vice president of the Chamber even predicted that Casado’s speech “will be read in the history of Spanish parliamentarism” and remarked that this Thursday had been “a very important day for the PP when defining the alternative that we are.” Another former minister of the PP of the moderate sector, Elvira Rodríguez,
Casado did not want to repeat to his parliamentarians in private the messages spun in the hemicycle, but he thanked them for their support. In his environment, on the one hand, the time and place chosen to take a step forward in his focused leadership (the Congress of Deputies and in a motion of censure) was praised, as well as the success and acceptance of the pre-established plan to break forever with Vox, the far right and Abascal, whom he disqualified as “ungrateful and disloyal” for not seeing anything good in a game that gave him work for 15 years. An invective that the positions and apparatuses of the parties always welcome.
The design of this strategy of rupture had been conceived since the summer, but the words issued especially on Wednesday by Abascal to justify his candidacy, which Casado labeled as “barbarities” of the past and anti-European, triggered his need and urgency to distance himself from the one that was your party partner. Although this Thursday he specified that he was at school then. “So far we have come,” he released in another dramatic moment of their separation.
Casado has been outlining his intervention for weeks, although he especially polished it last weekend. Most of the sentences were written by himself, as he likes to do before great parliamentary occasions, first advised by his wife, Isabel Torres. Last Saturday he was at the Price circus with his children and on Sunday he walked through the Retreat. On Monday and Tuesday he locked himself up with his chief of staff, Pablo Hispán, who coordinates this type of work, and with the new parliamentary legal adviser, José Sánchez Arce, a former economic journalist and copywriter for Mariano Rajoy at La Moncloa. On Wednesday he listened to Abascal and went to his office for a meeting with the vice president of the European Commission and euro commissioner, Valdis Dombrovskis. Later he finished off the tail of a speech that can mark his entire career.
