“Populists and Radicals”. This is how Pablo Casado has defined Vox before the National Executive Committee that analyzes this Tuesday the scenario after the elections in Castilla y León. The president of the party has supported Alfonso Fernández Mañueco to negotiate “a strong, stable and solitary government, with firm pillars, without borrowed suits and without the sword of Damocles hanging over his head”. “He has our full support” for the negotiation, he has said. “With our principles always present”, he added, to enumerate that “equality is not negotiable, neither is territorial cohesion, nor regional integrity, nor integration in Europe”.
Pablo Casado has intervened before the body that brings together his leadership with the regional barons. All the regional presidents of the PP have attended the meeting, with the exception of the Andalusian Juan Manuel Moreno, absent since the end of the campaign in Castilla y León. At the entrance, the president of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, has insisted that she prefers to agree with anyone except him “sanchismo“. A signifier in which it brings together everyone, except Vox.
“I hope there is a government based on the sum of interests against this totalitarian project that is destroying Spain,” he said this morning, at an informative breakfast that has marked the day’s agenda in the PP, referring to the central government. “That we know how to seek with other parties what unites us and, above all, shield Castilla y León from identity politics, poverty and despair, and that we do not care what the left thinks about our pacts”, she concluded.
Ayuso has defended that Mañueco must negotiate with autonomy, but has defended his own agreement with Vox. Casado’s response, with whom the internal quarrel over control of the PP in Madrid has been reopened, has arrived after six in the afternoon. “Those who seek to destabilize prick the bone. We do not accept pressure”, pointed out the president of the party, who has stated that his objective is “to unite the right without disuniting Spain” for which he is committed to “strengthening a party that is in the right [el PP] to do a homework assignment.
Casado has defended on several occasions the “autonomism” recognized by the Constitution, “Europeanism”, in whose construction he has put the PP; and “Atlanticism”, just after the meeting that Santiago Abascal had with the Hungarian president, Viktor Orbán, one of the few allies that Vladimir Putin has in Europe.
“There are those who mistake priorities and are more concerned with replacing the PP than with changing the Government” of Sánchez, he added. “The second they cannot do, the first we warn them that it will never happen,” he warned.
But it has not been the only reference to the policies proposed by Vox. Almost at the same time that Congress is debating two far-right initiatives with marked xenophobic overtones, Casado has asked to reject these ideas and the PP will not join Vox’s parliamentary proposals this Tuesday, as announced by the spokeswoman, Cuca Gamarra. The president has positioned his party as “an alternative to radicalism and populism on the left and right.”
But the PP knows that the 31 attorneys in Mañueco are not enough, far from it. For this reason, he has pointed out that the PP is “by conviction a party that dialogues and reaches agreements, to our left and to our right.” “On another axis as well,” he added, in a veiled reference to the provincial parties that Mañueco himself ignored this morning.
“But I want to say that we have limits to agree and agree. Our principles are our conditions. And we are not going to give them up, never,” he snapped. “Equality is not negotiable, neither is territorial cohesion, nor regional integrity, nor integration in Europe”, she stated. “We do not accept constitutional revisionism, whether against the autonomous communities, the councils or the monarchy,” she added, to conclude: “Whoever wants to agree will have to accept and respect them.”
Internal message: “Be self-demanding, not self-destructive”
Casado has taken advantage of his speech to launch some internal messages. He has first proposed defending the “foundations” of the PP, which “are not those of any populism.” The president has said that the PP is, right now, the party of his European family that is doing best, after the “collapse” of the German CDU-CSU, the “dismemberment” in France or “the messes” in Italy.
The opposition leader has asked “to be self-demanding, not self-destructive” and, in a veiled reference to José María Aznar’s speech during the campaign, has pointed out: “I am not in politics to get anywhere, however, nor do what whatever. It wasn’t the mandate the party gave me.”
“We cannot waste any more energy in sterile skirmishes to see who has the loudest occurrence,” he said, without mentioning anyone. Yesterday, Ayuso and his team once again recovered the pressure to assume command of the Madrid PP as soon as possible.
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