Married orders Bou to dismiss his chief of staff

Josep Bou, councilor and president of the PP group in the Barcelona City Council, has been ordered by the party leader, Pablo Casado, to dispense with his chief of staff, Luis Barroso, lieutenant of the Bolivarian Navy of Venezuela and former director of the Ministerial Office of the Presidency of Venezuela, between May 2015 and April 2017.

Barroso’s presence is nothing new, but internal criticism in the PP is raging now, in the absence of a year and a half for the municipal elections of 2023. It is usually the moment in which the parties are activated when a possible mayor is questioned and when succession debates are opened.

Bou stood out from the first day as an atypical candidate and councilor, as he himself underlines. He is a business man, who has dedicated his entire life to the bread sector, and who is not used to party discipline. He usually compares political activity with business activity, and since he arrived at the city council he collided with the nature of a world that he claims does not involve risk because no one sees his work in danger if it does not obtain results, unlike the private sector.

Order of the vice secretary of the party

According to sources familiar with the matter, Bou received the order to dispense with Barroso through Ana Beltrán, Vice Secretary of Organization of the PP. Until now, the councilor has maintained a close relationship with the leadership, in Madrid, and in fact his endorsement has been the favor of Casado from the first day, while he has maintained an absent or conflictive relationship with the party in Barcelona. An example of this has been the distance with the other PP councilor in the Barcelona town hall, Óscar Ramírez, although now Bou maintains that this is rather cordial. Sources close to the councilor deny having received the order of Married and they maintain that they have no intention of resigning.

The presence of Barroso causes discomfort in the ranks of the PP due to his past close to the Government of Nicolás Maduro, as published yesterday by ‘El Mundo’, which placed the ex-military man behind some decisions by Bou that have generated protests from the popular Barcelona in recent years. years. Among them, the one to fire several people linked to the group in the town hall against the criteria of the party stands out.

First he fired two advisers who shared an entire advisory position. One was Alfredo Bergua, who had worked in the group since 2007. He was responsible for Security, Sports and Culture and is Vice Secretary of Communication of the PP of Barcelona. The other, Miguel Raposo, president of the PP de Gràcia and district coordinator of the party. Joan Castelló, head of communication for the PP in the town hall since 2007, who has worked there since 2004, was fired in March 2020.

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The achievement of Bou

Despite the problems of coexistence, no one in the PP denies Bou a major merit: they admit that it was his character and his electoral campaign that allowed the popular to maintain their representation in the town hall when it was greatly endangered. By 45 votes, Bou’s list was not left out of the consistory, which would have been a terrible blow to the popular brand.