Thursday, March 28

Casado agrees to an extraordinary congress of the PP and García Egea presents his resignation


The president of the PP, Pablo Casado, will summon his National Board of Directors (JDN), the highest body of the party, to an extraordinary meeting next Tuesday, March 1. Teodoro García Egea will not attend her as general secretary. The number two of the party has resigned this Tuesday, as confirmed by elDiario.es. In the JDN, the holding of an extraordinary congress to elect the future leadership of the party will be debated, and will vote if necessary. Casado thus yields to the growing pressure from the regional leaders to speed up his departure from the party. A pressure that his closest circle has joined, which has been reduced to just half a dozen people who remain faithful to him. Casado, for the moment, has not communicated when said extraordinary congress could be or whether or not he intends to run for a second term.

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Casado thus takes another step in his slow process to abandon the leadership of the PP that he assumed in 2018. On Monday he found that his closest circle, the Management Committee, was split in two. A good part of his deputy general secretaries demanded that he convene the Board of Directors and agree to an extraordinary congress. If he didn’t do so, they would resign.

Among them were the parliamentary spokespersons (Cuca Gamarra, Javier Maroto and Dolores Montserrat), as well as the vice president of Congress, Ana Pastor, or the president of the Guarantees Committee, Andrea Levy. At the stroke of eight o’clock on Friday night, the leadership of the PP communicated this agreement. But on Tuesday the JDN has not been formally convened, there have even been doubts about the date and the agenda. If this does not expressly state that the extraordinary congress will be debated, the decision cannot be made.

The pressure throughout Tuesday has been growing, both against Casado and against his number twoTeodoro García Egea, whom many point to as being responsible for what has happened in recent months between the president and Isabel Díaz Ayuso. The controlled detonation, in the form of leaking an alleged espionage, of the payments made by the brother of the president of Madrid to a company that contracts with her government, has ended with Casado barricaded in the national headquarters on Génova street in Madrid, literally surrounded of thousands of people calling for his resignation.

This same Tuesday, the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office has reported the opening of an investigation into the mask contract that Ayuso’s brother charged.

The trickle of faithful to Casado who have abandoned ship to demand that he take a step back so that the extraordinary congress chooses a new direction has been continuous. Throughout the morning the leadership of the parliamentary group demanded the resignation of the secretary general. In the statement, yes, there was no signature of Cuca Gamarra or Ana Pastor. About 24 hours after the agreement reached in the Board of Directors, both, in addition to other deputy general secretaries, made public their disagreement with Casado with texts very similar to that of the parliamentary spokesperson: “I ratify what I transferred yesterday in the Committee of the PP Directorate”.

After these messages, Casado has relented and issued a brief statement: “The president of the Popular Party, Pablo Casado, convenes the National Board of Directors for next Tuesday, March 1, for the celebration of the XX National Congress, which will be extraordinary” .





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