Rains, it pours. The PP cannot find its own discourse for Catalonia and every time an autonomous president stands out and demands a differentiated voice, he ends up having problems with the national leadership, which applies its criteria without paying attention to the complexity of the multifaceted Catalan politics.
It happened with Alejo Vidal-Quadras and Josep Piqué, radically opposite profiles, and now the same thing is happening with Alejandro Fernández, who has challenged Genoa as a result of the PP's approach maneuvers to Junts to explore the investiture of Alberto Núñez Feijóo.
"Guardianship, authoritarian impositions, ideological lurches...", the terms used by critics of the strategy undertaken by the executive after the results of the general elections on July 23 are resounding. "Genoa always ends up sabotaging the Catalan PP and then blames its leaders for the failure," they say. "Feijóo desperately seeks to reissue the Majestic pact without even knowing where Passeig de Gràcia is", they ironize, because Junts, they agree, has nothing to do with the 1996 CiU.
"Jordi Pujol was used to a submissive PP," recalls Alejo Vidal-Quadras, who was ousted by José María Aznar due to the demands of the then president, who saw an "existential threat" in the vehement popular spokesperson in Parliament, since he argued with him the principles and values of his conception of Catalonia. So much so, he assures him, that if he had continued at the forefront, Ciudadanos would not have been born.
But Aznar gave in, he adds, because whenever Madrid has to choose between a project – and his was beginning to bear fruit: the PP went from 6 to 17 deputies in the Catalan Chamber – and a short-term advantage – Aznar's investiture with the support of CiU–, “mental confusion” leads them to sacrifice Catalonia, which in the capital they only know how to see, another source points out, as “an electoral black hole”.
For Manuel Milián Mestre, who represented the link between Catalanism and conservatism at the beginning of the party and was the link between Manuel Fraga and Pujol for years, the turning point came later, with the absolute majority in 2000, after the which Aznar unleashed his "Castilian animosity" towards the other cultures of Spain. A turn, he says, with which Fraga, at the time president of the Xunta, did not agree.
Between one moment and another, he adds, when Aznar spoke Catalan privately, there were conversations, encouraged by Francisco Álvarez-Cascos and Josep Sánchez Llibre (then CiU's second in Congress), for the PP of Catalonia to dissolve in the Josep Antoni Duran Lleida's UDC, but he did not want to take the step.
That emancipation, analogous to that of the PSC from the PSOE, would have been fruitful, believes Milián, to whom when Aznar cut the "umbilical cord" with the Catalan origins of the party, financed by the banker Josep Maria Santacreu at the beginning of the transition, "A wound" was opened that still persists: "From then on in Genoa they considered the Catalan PP a daughter, they do not understand Catalonia."
This "branchism" was also suffered by the long-awaited Josep Piqué in the five-year period (2002-07) in which he led the party and tried to forge alliances with the moderate nationalism from which he himself came at a time when Pasqual Maragall's tripartite it put an end to pujolismo and the Tinell pact excluded the PP from governance.
His service record as a minister and government spokesman did not shield him from the "tares" of Genoa, evokes a party source in Catalonia. "In Madrid they use us, they take us and put them, depending on their interests, through the cacique families here." "Piqué was never seen as a man of the party," says Milián.
With this background, Alejandro Fernández jokes that the presidency of the Catalan PP is more complicated than the Barça bench. This Saturday, while he hurries his holidays in Asturias, the Barcelona provincial leadership has organized an act to start the course in which the senior staff of the party in Catalonia will participate, among which the discontent is growing and may explode.
Until now, silence has been imposed, but they have not liked the moment chosen by the regional president to entrench himself ideologically before the opening to dialogue, making a virtue of necessity, with the formation of Carles Puigdemont or the tone of his comments on the change strategy of the national direction.
These outbursts of "guardian of the essences" of Fernández are interpreted as an attempt to reinforce himself among the militancy before the next congress of the PP of Catalonia, postponed time and time again and still without a date.
However, the conflict was latent and this crisis has only brought it to the fore. "There has been trouble for a long time," admits a leader who declares himself equidistant in the struggle for power in which the mayor of Castelldefels, Manuel Reyes, and MEP Dolors Montserrat appear as Fernández's rivals. Although the normal thing, he understands, would be for him to follow orders or resign if the discrepancies with Feijóo's team are insurmountable, instead of airing them on social networks, Fernández, he acknowledges, already accumulates many slights and seeing himself "cornered", each time more isolated, “he defends himself as best he can”.
