During the first weeks of September, in full back to school policy, the National Convention of the PP, which Pablo Casado had presented with great enthusiasm before the summer, seemed to twist or even gag. Especially since last Tuesday the 7th, during an informative breakfast in Madrid, the first important battle was unleashed for the leadership of the Madrid PP, to which it aspires Isabel Diaz Ayuso but for the one who has not yet been ruled out José Luis Martínez-Almeida.
The contest, which has other secondary characters that have come to light at this time, reached important episodes of tension and disagreement, mainly when the national leadership of the party denied the request of the president of the Community of Madrid to advance the conclave, scheduled for the first half of 2022.
But now, at the gates of culminating this weekend in Valencia that Convention, which will have its fourth day in Cartagena (Murcia) this Friday, everything has been tilted in favor of Casado. The opposition leader arrives grown in his leadership, with the tail wind of the polls in favor and, last but not least, having largely pacified the situation created in Madrid, with an Ayuso “willing to collaborate”, as noted by sources from the national leadership of the PP.
The threat that the Madrid president’s tour of the US would prevent her from being at the Convention, and specifically at the table of the regional presidents that will take place this Saturday, was cleared a long time ago, although it came to greatly tighten the internal seams of the party and to disconcert Casado. He was the great supporter of Ayuso in 2019, when he chose her as a regional candidate despite being an almost totally unknown politician and after years of friendship since the two met in New Generations, the party’s youth organization.
The absence of Ayuso at the station in the capital of Spain of the traveling convention, this Wednesday, was supplemented both by the prominence of Mayor Almeida, strongly applauded, and by that of practically all of both his municipal corporation and that of councilors of the regional government.
Married and Almeida, together with José Manuel Durao Barroso.
Without forgetting Hope Aguirre, who appeared at the event after having been dispatched with out of order boxes in an interview against the councilor and against Genoa, where, according to what he said, “little children” and “chiquilicuatres” lived. He passed some of those mentioned in the lobby of the Reina Sofía Museum auditorium, where he also chatted amiably in front of all the cameras with both Almeida and Casado.
But apart from these troubles, the Convention is proposed as the great launching pad for Casado in the face of the next general elections, which would take place in 2023 if not anticipated. “Pablo, you will be the next president of the Government” is the phrase that , word up or down, more has been heard in the conclave, from the mouths of both former presidents of the Government, Mariano Rajoy and José María Aznar, as from other party leaders or international guest stars, including the controversial Nicolas sarkozy, that twenty-four hours after his presence at the meeting of his Spanish co-religionists, he received, this Thursday, a second conviction for irregular financing of one of his campaigns.
The prediction was also made on Thursday in Seville by another of the star guests, the Nobel Prize in Literature, Mario Vargas Llosa, who also announced that he will vote for the PP before the disappearance of “the liberal party”, referring to Ciudadanos, which he had previously supported.
Former leaders of Ciudadanos such as Toni Cantó, now director of the Office of El Español in Madrid, and Juan Carlos Girauta, the former spokesman for the orange formation, who also showed his support for Casado. Even one of the main founders of Vox and former leader of the PP, Alejo Vidal-Quadras, who showed his emotion to return to his old house although he did not hesitate to criticize the “blindness” of the popular in defense of the State of the autonomies, in his opinion the origin of the challenge of Catalan secessionism.
Married and Vargas Llosa.
The absorption of the political space of Ciudadanos, both of the leaders and of the voters, is one of the undisguised objectives of a Casado who already appeared in the PP primaries in 2018 for that purpose. And both the overwhelming victory of Ayuso in the autonomic elections of 4-M, in which those of Ines Arrimadas, as the demoscopic consensus supports that it is being carried out.
This path of reconquering the liberal or centrist space has as one of its main milestones the speech of Casado against the motion of censure of Santiago Abascal, of which one year will be completed in a few weeks. And the polls say that with a clearly downward Citizens, with difficulties even to maintain its already meager own group in the Congress of Deputies, the PP shoots up and leads the PSOE in voting intentions, except for the CIS.
Although that advantage, which was about five percentage points in summer, and which was also enough to add a majority of the Government with Vox, has been reduced in September, precisely during the weeks of greatest tension between Genoa and Ayuso. Now the advantage over the Socialists is one or two points and the absolute majority with those of Abascal could be in danger.
This Sunday Casado will close the Convention in the Plaza de Toros de Valencia, historic scene of the great rallies of the golden ages of the PP in one of its traditional fiefdoms, today in the hands of the left. From that ‘kilometer zero’ Casado intends to recover the space that returns his party to La Moncloa, where two other PP presidents have lived. Because as Rajoy said on the first day of the Convention, “there are not two without three.”
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Reference-www.elespanol.com