The damnatio memoriae was a practice by which the Roman Senate condemned disgraced rulers to oblivion: the image of the outlaw was erased from monuments and coins and even its mere public mention was prohibited. But rewriting history does not mean redoing the present.
One year after the overthrow of Pablo Casado as president of the PP in a bloody conspiracy by the regional barons, the problems of the party to widen its political space, imprisoned between the extreme right of Santiago Abascal and the PSOE of Pedro Sánchez, are not very different from the ones I had then.
As much as the PP officially "counts on everyone" and has its doors open "singularly" for Casado, due to his relevance and the responsibilities exercised, as Borja Sémper assured yesterday, the figure of the former popular leader has not been publicly rehabilitated.
And it won't be in the immediate future. His successor in the presidency of the party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has given the order not to "look in the rear-view mirror", according to the formula used by the campaign spokesperson, given the "unequivocal desire for change" of Spanish society.
Away from the spotlight and plunged into a monastic silence since his dismissal, after which he has entered the private sector as a defense and cybersecurity adviser, Casado was not together with José María Aznar and Mariano Rajoy at the festivities of the recent PP intermunicipal 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 hand and today, relegated to the second row, is preparing his departure from Congress to dedicate himself to the enigmatic cryptocurrencies, were abandoning the boss to whom they had promised fidelity. eternal.
The duel to first blood 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 at the height of the pandemic – the next day they asked for her head.
And also from José Luis Martínez-Almeida, who without having meant as much as she did in favor of Casado and always denying any relationship with Genoa's attempts to spy on the Madrid leader, feared being harmed by Ayuso's unstoppable rise to the presidency of the regional PP. Saved from burning after ceasing to be the national spokesman, the mayor of Madrid aspires to repeat his position.
This contention by Feijóo by conserving part of the remains of Casado's shipwreck resulted in a rapid closing of ranks with the new president in which some tweets were covered with a thick veil. The turnaround in the polls helped turn the page.
But the Feijóo effect, whose "cordial bilingualism", after Casado spoke of "linguistic apartheid" and fabulous punishments for Spanish-speaking children in Catalan schools, was received with relief in Catalonia, especially in the economic and business sector, and he also gave oxygen to Alejandro Fernández, sentenced by the previous executive for having crashed at the polls, had no prolonged effects.
After a few months of a certain demoscopic idyll, the rise of the PP seems to have peaked and the party continues to seek a way to expand the electoral space it occupies: on the one hand, moving away from the overexcited Casadista drift, a failed strategy to contain the ultra threat , and, on the other, recovering moderate voices like that of Sémper, a kind face at the press conference after the meeting of the management committee on Mondays.
But the weak point of Feijóo's PP, which succumbed to the capital's media ordeal and backtracked on the pact for the renewal of the General Council of the Judiciary, something that was interpreted as a gesture of weakness in the face of the springs of power that activates the environment of Ayuso, it continues to be, as in the days of Casado, the impossibility of breaking the blocks in which Spanish politics is entrenched.
The idea that the most voted list should govern, incongruous in a parliamentary system such as the Spanish one, and aware of the limitations imposed by the established cross vetoes, has fallen on deaf ears. With more potential allies than Vox, Feijóo is trying to break the seams of the PP's Christian-Democratic tradition, assuming the risk of a mutiny on board, in order to appeal to the more centrist PSOE constituency, as seen in his acceptance of the term law of the abortion, contested during the stage of Mariano Rajoy, and in the abstention in the vote of the trans law, in which he coincided with none other than Carmen Calvo, a historic representative of socialist feminism.
Three months after the municipal and regional elections in May, in which he has placed more than complicated duties on Ayuso – the absolute majority in the Madrid Assembly – to lower the smoke to his main internal rival, Feijóo continues to seek the square of the circle.
Chastened on someone else's head from Casado's experience and putting on the bandage before the wound for what could happen, since the Madrid president and her courtly chorus would hardly give him a second chance if he failed, Feijóo has already announced his retirement if he fails to win the presidency of the Government in the end-of-year elections.
If that were the case, his leadership in the PP would have been even more ephemeral than that of his predecessor, condemned to implacable oblivion.
