The president of the Popular Party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has shared lunch this Wednesday with his predecessor in office, Pablo Casado, after a year has passed since the greatest internal crisis of the conservative formation.
This has been confirmed by PP sources familiar with this meeting that took place near the Senate, where the PP president later went to participate in the voting on parliamentary initiatives. These sources recalled that both had this meeting pending, which had already been postponed for scheduling reasons on a previous occasion, and that they framed the normality of their relationship and respect and not the anniversary of Casado's goodbye. The sources add that Feijóo and Casado have a fluid relationship that they have maintained over time, and in the last year they have shared reflections on various occasions.
In the early morning of February 23 to 24, 2022, Casado agreed with the PP barons to march in an extraordinary congress in April in which Feijóo, a consensus candidate in the party, was chosen to take over after his open confrontation with the president. of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, for control of the party in Madrid, which led to crossed accusations of espionage and corruption and a true 'civil war' within the conservative formation.
And it is that a year later and despite the fact that the PP officially "has everyone" and has the doors open "singularly" for Casado, due to his relevance and the responsibilities exercised, as the popular spokesman Borja Sémper assured on Monday, the figure of the former leader has not been publicly rehabilitated.
Casado, who now works in a defense fund, is silent and has not had any public intervention since the Seville Congress in April last year, in which Feijóo was elected as leader. "He has redone his working life, he is away from politics. He is calm," one of his trusted people told Europa Press.
Last Monday, Sémper told journalists that the PP has to look to the future and not by the "rear-view mirror", without "getting entangled" in issues that occurred then, when asked on several occasions if the PP is considering how to rehabilitate Casado .
Casado was not together with José María Aznar and Mariano Rajoy at the festivities of the recent PP intermunicipal meeting in Valencia, where the two Chinese vases of the popular dynasty found a place that he was denied.
But if Casado's absence at the beginning of the month was attributed to his lack of government experience, these days, on the anniversary of his resounding fall as party leader, the PP is finding it impossible to divert attention from the revelations about what It happened in those days of February 2022, in which a dramatic fratricidal fight took over the formation before the astonished gaze of Spanish society.
On the first anniversary of the events, the ins and outs – private conversations and messages in WhatsApp groups – of the brutal confrontation between Casado and Isabel Díaz Ayuso, in which the former gradually lost all his internal support one by one, have become known.
All except his lieutenant, Teodoro García Egea, who exercised the general secretary of the PP with an iron fist and today, relegated to the second row, is preparing his departure from Congress to dedicate himself to the enigmatic cryptocurrencies, they were abandoning the boss.
The duel with Ayuso, with Shakespearean overtones due to the old friendship that united them, took Casado away, who saw how those who one day congratulated him on the "clarity, seriousness and truth" of his ethical position in the case of alleged corruption that affected the Madrid president – her brother's commission for the sale of masks at the price of gold in the crudest of the pandemic – the next day they asked for her head.
