It is a message that repeats again and again the president of the Popular Party, Pablo Casado, and in which he insisted last 29th, in his last public appearance before the summer holidays: “When we arrived [in 2018, at the head of the PP] we were the third political force in Spain according to the polls and today we are already the first”. As if they were a lifeline, Casado clings to those polls that suggest that his party could be the most voted force in the event of a general election to try to keep alive his leadership – characterized by successive electoral defeats – at least for two years, until Pedro Sánchez calls again to the polls in 2023, once the legislature is exhausted, if his forecasts are fulfilled.
Casado accuses the government of “hiding” the number of deaths caused by the pandemic and “ending national sovereignty”.
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That leadership has been threatened since May by one of Casado’s own personal bets, the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, whom he himself handpicked as a candidate in 2019. She swept the last Madrid elections, falling just four seats short of an absolute majority. She achieved more representatives than the sum of the three left-wing forces and absorbed all the vote of Ciudadanos – which until two months earlier had been his partner in government – which lost all its representation in the Madrid Assembly.
Ayuso’s threat is justified by the evidence that the “reunification” in the PP of the right divided into three – in addition to the popular, Vox and Ciudadanos – something that obsesses Casado since his triumph in the primaries, never came to materialize in the elections in which he appeared as head of the cartel – the popular obtained the worst results in its history in the two general of 2019 -. But it did begin to take shape in Madrid, one of the strongholds of the conservative parties, at the hands of Ayuso, who maintains her own profile and differentiated from the leader of the PP, with radicalized messages closer to Vox, a party that Casado is also approaching now in search of an electoral effect similar to that of his Madrid baroness.
“C
hen the Popular Party is the government alternative to Sánchez that brings together the votes of the entire center right and that even receives social democratic votes, we generally have sufficient majorities of government” #SánchezNoCumple
@pablocasado_ pic.twitter.com/7eQdzoLtmn-
Partido Popular (@populares) July 29, 2021
That unity of the right-wing vote in the PP has been maintained in Galicia, another stronghold of conservatism, by the hand of a leader with a profile very different from Ayuso: the president of the Xunta de Galicia, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who within the party is considered the maximum exponent of the most moderate sector. There, neither Ciudadanos nor Vox have representatives in the regional parliament, something that the Galician president boasts, which, whenever possible, also tries to move away from Casado’s doctrine, emphasizing his own personality even above the party’s acronym.
Genoa 13 sees “consolidated” Casado
Between the two barons with greater institutional power, the model that most pleases the leader of the PP is that of Ayuso, who, like him, is more to the right. The success of the Madrid leader runs the risk, however, of ending up phagocytizing Casado, who if he has managed to improve in the polls has been precisely as a result of the momentum of the victory of the president in the elections of May 4.
The national president of the popular has felt the threat of his partner and friend in the streets. The general indifference with which they tend to welcome him at rallies or public events even their own voters contrasts with the furor that generates Ayuso among the conservative electorate. It was seen in the concentration of the Plaza de Colón on June 13 against the pardons to the pro-independence leaders, a protest monopolized by Vox in which Casado was booed by a part of the attendees who, at the same time, clamored for the president of Madrid to run for the Moncloa. Also, more recently, in Salamanca, when on the occasion of the celebration of the Conference of Presidents Ayuso was the territorial leader most applauded and acclaimed by the citizens.
The official message from Genoa 13 is, however, that they do not fear that the Madrid president is going to try to dispute Casado’s leadership, but rather strengthens it, because it was he who chose her as a candidate and because, as the PP leader himself often says, the policies that Ayuso has implemented in Madrid – based on widespread tax cuts, privatizations and reduction of the public service system – are the “example” of what he would do in the case of reaching the Moncloa. “We have consolidated our national leadership as the only alternative to theiva to the misgovernment that we suffer,” Casado said on July 21 at the celebration of his third anniversary as president of the PP.
Three years after his victory, Casado has not managed to overcome the division of the right-wing electorate, although his strategy of radicalization that in all the electoral events held since 2018 – with the exception of the Madrid elections in May in which the triumph is more attributable to the personalism of Isabel Díaz Ayuso than to the leader of the PP – proved unsuccessful, and that led him to accumulate consecutive defeats at the polls, now begins to bear fruit in the polls, and therefore clings to those polls, with the aim of maintaining and strengthening his leadership.
Studies published recently by different media point to the possibility that, if the general elections were held now, the Popular Party would be the first force in the country, ahead of Pedro Sánchez’s PSOE. Even in the latest Barometer of the Centre for Sociological Research (CIS), made public in July, although the PP dropped a few tenths compared to the previous study – going from 23.9% in June to 23.4% in July – Casado’s party has been on an upward trend since March, when it reached a low of 17.9% in voting intentions. Always according to the CIS, the popular continue installed in a comfortable cushion that places them above their results of 10N, when they were made with 20.8% of the votes, their second worst result in history after the collapse of the elections of April 2019, in which they were left with only 16.69% of the suffrages.
Absorption of Ciudadanos and the threat of Vox
In addition to the impulse that meant for the PP the triumph of Ayuso, this recovery in the polls is explained by the wear of the Government during the management of the pandemic and the collapse of Ciudadanos, one of the three pieces of the right, which has suffered one setback after another at the polls since 10N, going from first to seventh force in its main square, Catalonia, and disappearing from the Assembly of Madrid.
Casado gives in fact for amortized to the formation of Inés Arrimadas, weighed down by its continuous swerves and already partly absorbed by the PP not only at the electoral level but also in the case of some of its most prominent leaders, such as Fran Hervías or Toni Cantó, who have gone to the popular ranks. The head of the opposition has even achieved the connivance of the former president of Ciudadanos, Albert Rivera, who from his law firm has advised the PP in The last few months for several of its resources in the courts and that Genoa 13 seeks a fit, with an eye on the National Convention next fall with which Casado intends to consolidate itself as an “alternative” to Sanchez.
What Casado has not managed three years after winning the primaries is to neutralize his rival on the right, Vox. Despite appeasing with his speech and his forms, the party of Santiago Abascal has remained in the last electoral appointments and resists in the polls, assuming now the main burden for the PP to achieve a comfortable majority when it is called back to the polls. However, Genoa 13 takes for granted that if the polls remain as they are now when Sánchez calls elections – the president has already said that he plans to run out the legislature until 2023 -, the PP will have the support of Vox to take Casado to the Moncloa.
As it happens to Ayuso, the leader of the popular party is no longer uncomfortable with the support of the extreme right – which has also been necessary in Madrid, Andalusia or Murcia – despite staging a kind of break with Abascal in the failed motion of censure registered by Vox last fall, which has already been rebuilt with new pacts between the two parties vying for the same electorate but that for the moment are needed to come to power.
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