The Long Road Back: Spain’s Popular Party (PP) — Part 2

Spanish Political Parties Series, Part 2 of 8

The second half of our PP story opens on the worst morning in modern Spanish history. On 11 March 2004, three days before a general election the Popular Party expected to win comfortably, an Al-Qaeda cell detonated bombs on Madrid's commuter rail. Roughly 200 people died; it remains the deadliest terrorist attack the European Union has ever suffered, larger than Paris or London, and yet curiously less fixed in the international memory. We try to hold two things at once here: the human tragedy of 11M, mourned every year much as the United States mourns its own September date, and the political rupture that followed it. 

In 72 hours an electorate that was set to re-elect a government turned and removed it. How much of that swing was authentic moral revulsion at a governing party that had first blamed ETA, and how much was a coordinated campaign to pin the dead of Atocha on Aznar's alignment with Washington, is the question we sit with rather than resolve. What is not in dispute is that the left learned something that morning about the uses of the streets, and that the school of Zapatero was founded in those three days.

From there the episode becomes, in large part, an extended meditation on a single man and a single temperament. Mariano Rajoy governed the Spanish right for fourteen years, from the shock of 2004 to the no-confidence vote of 2018, and we make the case that his defining gift and his defining flaw were the same thing: a genius for staying still. He won the largest victory in the party's history in 2011, one hundred and eighty-six seats, and yet that triumph rested on a collapsed Socialist government and twenty-five per cent unemployment rather than on any positive enthusiasm for him. The "technocrat" label, which in English flatters and in Spanish insults, captures the puzzle. We trace the ideological inconsistencies that hollowed out the party's credibility: opposition to same-sex marriage later quietly abandoned, a Historical Memory Law denounced in opposition and never repealed in power, tax cuts promised and thirty tax rises delivered. Whatever one's own position on each issue, the pattern corrodes trust, and trust, once spent, does not return.

The Catalan crisis of 2017 is where we locate the real fracture. Faced with an illegal referendum staged with plastic ballot boxes, Rajoy reached for the judges and reached for Article 155 of the Constitution only after the fact, when the political moment had passed. It fell to King Felipe VI to give what was effectively a political speech, and to the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, not the prime minister, to headline the great unity rally in the streets of Barcelona. Separatism has fallen since, but the lesson voters drew about their own government's passivity proved expensive. We argue this is the moment the big tent that Fraga built and Aznar perfected began to come apart, scattering its classical-liberal and conservative occupants toward Ciudadanos and Vox.

The final part of the episode is a study in self-inflicted wounds. The Gürtel corruption affair was real but local, and the party's failure to defend the figures later acquitted of every charge. 

Then came Pablo Casado, young, articulate, genuinely a man of ideas, who destroyed himself in 2022 by moving against Isabel Díaz Ayuso over allegations we find, having seen the dossier, remarkably thin. Which leaves the strangest fact in Spanish politics today, and the one we keep circling: the most popular figure on the Spanish right does not lead it. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the overly-cautious Galician brought in as the adult in the room, has stabilised the party and brokered an uneasy coexistence with Vox, but excites no one. Ayuso, who may simply not want the job for reasons that are as much personal as strategic, remains the star. 

We close on the party's own 2025 self-description, "centro reformista," a phrase that means precisely nothing, and on the road to 2027, where the only thing certain is that voters will be excitedly embracing PP but unambiguously signaling no more Sánchez.

Next in the series: Vox.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Diego, we are back again.

SPEAKER_02 0:21

I don't know if you're trying to make me cry. It is a sad song and it is a sad story, so apologies for that. But you're playing a song that is a tribute to the 200 people, roughly, that lost their lives in 2004 in Spain, that is 22 years ago, when a bombing coordinated by a Al-Qaeda cell operating in Spain took the lives of hundreds right before the 2004 election. So, yes, in reality, nothing to joke about. It's a very sad story. And it's hard to listen to that song and not get emotional, to be honest. So sometimes we say in Spanish, mejor reír que llorar, better to laugh than to cry. So I guess I'll take the laugh. But of course, it's been 22 years, and I still remember what happened on that date. And I think we can probably devote to this a long time because that was not just a gigantic geopolitical event, a massive tragedy, human tragedy, but also led to a huge cultural shift in our country. But we're running the history of the Popular Party, and these events resonate with what happened to the Popular Party, because in our previous podcast, we walked our listeners through how Alianza Popular was born on the ashes of the right-wing circles after Franco's death. Then it eventually became the main party of the opposition, but was unable to break that ceiling that its historical leader had, Manuel Fraga. And then under Aznar, it was eventually able to grab power and stay on power successfully between 1996 and 2004. And this is where we're starting our second part of this series. And it starts on a tragic note because just three days before the 2004 election, this happens, and 200 people lose their lives.

SPEAKER_00 2:15

And all accounts it was going to be a lot more, but the bomb exploded early from what the terrorists planned in the tunnel up at Tosha Station here in Madrid. But if they had actually gone into the station and then exploded, it would have been even significantly more tragic.

SPEAKER_02 2:37

Yeah, I still remember when we heard the news in the morning. I'm 37. Learning about terrorist attacks in Spain was a thing during my childhood. Every now and then you would learn about these, and some of them were horrific in terms of their impact. Like a shopping mall was bombed in Barcelona. And then just politicians would be shot around the street or in a restaurant or wherever they were standing. And in this case, all signs seemed to be pointing to ETA, but Spain had been geopolitically by the side of the US and the UK on the whole Middle East front that was created, the Coalition of the Willing to take action in Afghanistan, in Iraq. Spain did not join the Iraqi operation but did support the peacekeeping mission. And Al-Qaeda took notice of that alliance between Aznar and W. Bush and decided to retaliate like this. The date, by the way, was an 11, March 11. So as you know, they did play with that date for a long time. It was September 11 in the US. It was March 11 for us in Spain. And PP was in office, the election was about to take place, and as we mentioned, Aznar had chosen the least likely candidate to stand for the presidency, Rajoy. Kind of a greyish candidate, but he was leading all the polls. So he stood to get re-elected. PP stood to get re-elected and remain in power. And then this happened and things changed.

SPEAKER_00 4:07

The actual story of how this influenced the election, you know, is also wild in some aspects, but also a bit fuzzy. Because there was a counter almost like a guerrilla campaign by the leftist movement at the time to really blame Pepe and Aznar, of course, for this happening in Madrid. So that seems to have been a key turning point also you mentioned in Spanish history. But we should get some more details on how that kind of guerrilla tactics, how dirty it was, and that's actually why it flipped so quickly in three days from a party that's gonna have another absolute majority to losing actually quite dramatically.

SPEAKER_02 4:55

There was a lot of far-left infiltration and shenanigans and propaganda in those three days leading up to the election. Every electoral law was violated. Think of a dirty campaign like we've seen, like US listeners are aware that those happen. So just double down on what you think But what did they do? Like for instance, the PP headquarters were immediately surrounded by activists posing as civilians. If you see the pictures of who these folks were, you see pictures of Pablo Iglesias or Inigo Rejong leading those protests. Who were they? Well, far left political activists would eventually be funded by Venezuela and launch a very successful communist group that eventually became a party of the Sanchez uh coalition government, right? So the far-left academia, the far-left activists, the far-left media. For those of us interested in cinema, Pedro Almodovar, a successful, very successful Spanish filmmaker, just blamed the government for what happened. Media started a non-stop campaign about how the government was spreading lies about why. Because of course the government's initial reaction was to put the blame on ETA, the mechanics of the terrorist attack were the ones that we were familiar with. And then when more things were revealed about the attack and it became apparent that it was an al-Qaeda attack, it was just pinned on Aznar and saying, well, this is PP and their geopolitical alliance with the US and the UK, I guess they wanted to be allies with Saddam Hussein. I don't know what's the call, the right call here, what's the right side of history? One could argue a lot about this, but the truth is that the polls just show that the election was going one way and it turned the other way. So Spanish society just changed their vote. So there was a light win by the socialists when they were standing for a massive defeat. It really swung the election in just a matter of days.

SPEAKER_00 6:59

Crazy as it sounds. And even today, Once M, so 11M, March 11th, Once M is remembered, tributed every year in Madrid. It's very much like a 9-11 typical tragedy that you know of in the US. Have the same thing: the parades, the mourning, the funeral processions, every year. Just to emphasize how tragic and how enduring that day still is in politics in Spain. Yes and no.

SPEAKER_02 7:34

Yes, because surely you'll see those very serious institutional acts of tribute. And I think that those of us who understand that this was a tragedy, an attack on an open society by a horrible group of terrorists responsible for literally thousands of deaths around the world, we see it like that. We remember it like that, and we uh pay homage to those that fell. But for the left, that was an opportunity. They just manipulated their way into power through this, and Spanish society did fall for that tactic, unfortunately. So today, when you think of March 11 in Spain, you think of tragedy, yes, but you also think of the moment in which the left realized that if they throw every single rule book in terms of ethics, morals, values, and just decide to play dirty and go for it no matter what, they stand to be in power. And since then, Zapatero's leadership has become the school for the Spanish socialist. Not saying that this party was much respectable before, but March 11 was just the dawning moment which they realized, yes, let's just do whatever we have to do to stay in power.

SPEAKER_00 8:48

Yeah, and of course, you know, there were some other attacks after that, not but by the means of the same scale, but also they were uh Islamist related. But just to inflate the point because it will come out later. On S M, or again 11M, was the still is the biggest terrorist attack in the European Union, and of course it was here in Spain. So when you think about, for example, more far-right rhetoric when we get there, these things come up quite a lot very quickly. Even the Paris bombings, it's not as big as Once M. Even though I think people remember I think people actually know the Paris bombings more than Ongse M. A bit more recently.

SPEAKER_02 9:30

London too. London at the moment. I mean those attacks, and surely it's not a matter of comparing which was worse, but if you're talking body counts. Yeah, body count. Surely this was bigger. Again, that's why we need this podcast. Because we do need to communicate the Hispanic affairs more in English. Just to close this and focus more on PP, I would say that there was attempts by Al-Qaeda to attack on Spanish soil since the late 90s. So it is nonsense to think that Spain was just a target because it had stood by the side of US and the British governments on this. And I say this because the blame was pinned on Aznar, as in, okay, you support Bush. Bush is going to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, so and now we're getting this terrorist group attacking us here. So you're to blame. You brought us into this. Well, not so easy. And since the late 90s, al-Qaeda attacks had been stopped by the authorities. A bit before the election, three months before the election, a so-called caravan of death was stopped by the police forces, Guardia Civil, and uh this was actually a truck loaded with dynamite that was essentially going to explode somewhere in Madrid at some point. But like I said, this was before W. Bush was in office, before 9-11, before Afghanistan, before Iraq. Since before all of that, Spain had been a target. And you may say, why? Well, in the Islamic terrorist realm or imaginarium, there is that rhetoric about Al-Andalus and the former Muslim past of significant chunks of the Spanish territory. In some areas, we're talking centuries of Islamic dominion. And today, like it's become a meme of funny thing that Muslim tourists visit Granada and Cordova, and just know that you can find them pointing out sides, talking to their families and saying, This used to be ours.

SPEAKER_00 11:40

I will add that I was in Sharjah which is a emirate within UAE. Yes. So not a very popular place people go, of course. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:48

But an interesting visit.

SPEAKER_00 11:49

Yeah, of course. And I went to the Museum of Islamic Civilization, and on the ground floor in this, you know, museum, there's a massive exhibition about Andalusia.

SPEAKER_01 12:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:03

So it is today in UAE in charge. When you see that up close, you realize the different worldviews people have are such clashing things. And yeah, they still claim it as part of their civilization. Exactly. Even to this day in UAE.

SPEAKER_02 12:19

In a way, we do claim the existence of a Hispanic sphere with a podcast like this. We we keep talking and discussing that as a broad historical, cultural, economic, political reality that has lasted for decades. Sorry, not decades, centuries. For the Hispanic, sorry, for the for the Muslim uh world, the concept of Al-Andalus is a strong element of its past. It's certainly an element of Spanish history, but unfortunately, it also means that for radicalized terrorists, that was something that could be weaponized and used. But I'm just saying, okay, so all of that changed leadership, and that threw PP's uh position out of the window. So the party was ready to just remain in power, and it was suddenly voted out of office seemingly out of nowhere. And when we had Governor Aguirre, who led Madrid for years, here on the podcast, what she said she remembers from her first year in office, amongst other things, dealing with the tragedy, because of course there's many bodies that need to be, you know, transported to a new purported facility that needed to be, you know, created on the fly to deal with this.

SPEAKER_00 13:25

I she was the president at that time, yeah, a year in.

SPEAKER_02 13:29

Yeah. She had been sworn in. I mean, she won an election in the spring of 2003, but then she called uh a snap election because of all those shenanigans surrounding her election. She won a clean mandate, so she called another election that was held late in 2003. And this happens early in 2004, so she had taken office a few months before. By the way, for you fans of Formula One, which I know there's many of them these days, the Madrid circuit, where the Formula One Grand Prix will take place, circles around the area which was where this campaign hospital was created. And it's also the area close to the airports, by the way, and it's also close to where Madrid did its COVID-focused instant hospital, which was lauded and praised as a huge success during the pandemic. But I mean, terrorist attacks, pandemic, Formula One. I think we better stick to PP because too many rabbit holes were going down here.

SPEAKER_00 14:23

Okay. So Pepe was then in opposition until 2011. So again, quite a long time again in opposition. And this election in 2011 was in many ways sh by the numbers, shocking, because this is the biggest ever win for Pepe in history to date. And they won and eighty 186 seats in the Congress and they were controlling the Senate. And also in that same year, in that time period, they also had a like uh all but three comunidades, I believe, and then almost all of no all of the major um um uh municipalities and the height height of Pepe power. But yet it doesn't feel like Pepe was that strong in that time period.

SPEAKER_02 15:24

No, it wasn't. It won large in 2011. But so you may wonder, well, there's a seven-year gap between you lose power and then you win power again. How is it that that party that apparently wins very large then becomes so fragmented that a few years after the fact uh it's enabled to regain that large majority and then eventually it splits it splits the center right in free? No, we'll get there later. And and and the and and the question and all the roots for all of that breakdown happen before PP comes back to power. So between 2004 and 2011, Rajoy was not a leader that was fit for you know properly leading an opposition charge. He was a at best a someone that could manage a well-functioning government, at worst, someone who had very few ideological priorities. He was just this technocratic in the worst sense of the word. I know that when we use it in English, we tend to think of an elite, well-trained elite, competent. In Spain, we just think of a manager with no ideas when we use the term technocrat. So that's the funny discussion you and I always have when this word comes up. So, yeah, Rajoy had been a minister of everything. He'd been a minister of education, he had managed the security forces, he'd managed so many things. But certainly had not a lot of ideas in his head, was known for like just reading sports newspaper every morning, and that's about it. Pretty late what guy, which is not necessarily the worst thing in the world, because you also don't want an extremely ideological guy if he's in it for the wrong idea, so at least he was wasn't obsessed with getting things done. So that will eventually lead to some good and bad decisions in his government, but no one was prepared for PP to lose power, so then he has to you know stay there, and opposition starts brewing within his party in the following years. Because what does PP want to be now that Asnat is out of the picture and that Rajoy stands not to be a president but rather an opposition leader? That's where questions begin to arise, right? So it was a question of gay marriage, which now PP supports, but at this point it stood against it and even called for large public demonstrations against it. So there was a naming battle that naming concern, like all of this feels very dated now. I don't think anyone is very concerned, but some people would object to the idea of calling it a marriage, and some on the center right, and just wanted to call it a union of sorts, but then they wanted equal rights, so then it was just a name thing, so it was kind of not the biggest battle, you would argue, at least from a liberal or libertarian perspective. Conservatives would probably fight this more for the religious implications of it, but PP went against this and now they fully embrace it. So why did they go against it if the core of the party would later embrace it? There's many examples of how the positions that PP took during this year's were inconsistent.

SPEAKER_00 18:27

I do wonder if that was just because it was Zapatero and Pesoe that did that change. It was not a parliamentary procedural change, the Zapatero government just changed the civil code, and then yeah, the PP changed they said, no, we're gonna put you in court, well, put this challenge in court, yeah, and it lasted seven years. And I remember there's a famous picture of Rajoy not too long after the Pepe deputies did the challenge against the tapote for changing the marriage rules, where he went to a gay wedding for one of his deputies. Yeah. And it is like during that time period, it was no, it's like maybe a year or so after. Yeah. So I was like, why why why do this?

SPEAKER_02 19:12

Uh for yeah, and forget about where you stand on this issue. By the way, I think 90% of Spaniards don't even contest this today. You could you can speak about this more than I do, certainly. But Spain is known for being pretty gay friendly. Forget about your position on this debate, which I'm assuming is the same as ours. But just think of the inconsistency more than the particular because this was repeated throughout this whole period. Now, PP would take one stance, but then just go along with another one. For example, there was a law by the Zapatero government, the Ley The Memoria Historica, the Historical Memory Law, that essentially restricts free speech and institutionalizes a single version of the Spanish Civil War and just the history of Spain from the 1930s to all the way up to today, under which the Spanish right brought Spain into dictatorship and the Spanish left saved us from Franco. Anyone that knows anything about the Second Republic or the Franco period or this transition to democracy knows there is so much to talk about and that there's so many blame that could be placed on either side. You don't get to a civil war just because one side is misbehaving for sure. And I would contend that many of the causes that led to this civil war that actually stem from the left and the way it exercised power or rallied against the forces of the center-right. But again, PP stood against this, did these massive demonstrations, and then eventually had absolute power under Roy and did not repeal these laws. So surely you were saying one thing while in opposition, and then eventually you will gain power. Many of these positions won't hold. In some cases, probably for the better, like K marriage, but in many cases for the worse. They were fighting tax increases and then they increased taxes when they came back to power. So a lot of these inconsistencies between what PP was saying while out of power and what PP did once in power have eroded the party and its credibility. Fraga, for once, was intellectually coherent in most of his trajectory. His only misstep was probably in the NATO referendum, which we alluded to, which he did for tactical purposes and which was just a stupid decision. But remain, uh roughly speaking, just your random center-right party, right? But in these years under Rajoy, everything was very conflictive. And Rajoy, who seemed not to be a power hungry guy, proved to be a very power hungry guy when he started to be challenged internally. And one of the things he did is he challenged libertarians or classical liberals to go fund their own party, and conservatives to go create their own party as well. This is a very famous proclamation, just like we all. Alluded to with the Aznar Declaration and the Fraga Declaration in the Sevilla Congress. Nitutelas Nitutillas, like you're I'm handling the reins, this is your party now. Fraga removes himself, and Aznar clearly positions this to be a free market, libertarian, conservative, big tent party. Well, in Valencia, 2008, I think, once Rajoy's power is internally challenged by the likes of Aguirre, who wants more ideological clarity and more direction, he says explicitly, el que se quiera ir al Partido Liberal, que se vaya. He who wants to go to the Liberal or Libertarian Party, he may go. He wants to go to the conservative party, he may go. This is the popular party. And there's a very obvious way to read into this. He didn't care about ideas. I don't want libertarians or conservatives, I just want the popular party. And of course, he was trying to present this as a big tent sort of argument. Like, we're not arguing factions here. But in reality, if you realize he was arguing for like, I don't want him fighting about ideologies, I don't want too much ideological definition. I just want to have a party that stands to win power at some point and eventually become president. He'll become president, he'll win by a landslide. But guess what? Spain had 25% unemployment. So if you run a mop or a brick against Zapatero, you would have won, right? A five-year-old would have won that election against Zapatero because he was extremely unpopular because the country was destroyed, economically destroyed. So Rajoy didn't win that election, the socialists lost that election.

SPEAKER_00 23:36

So Rajoy there are many policies that he did that were pretty garbage during that time. But just to move forward a bit, the probably the most critical part of that tenure was 2017. So this is the Cajalonia separation crisis. Whereas this is where the death knell of the coherent singular Pepe was dealt. Okay, let's give some colour on what happened in 2017 with Cajalonia and of course what Pepe did.

SPEAKER_02 24:16

Yeah. So ten years after Rajoy decides to not put up a single ideological fight, uh, ten years later, he is sitting in office, which is what he clearly wanted. His cabinet has done a little bit of everything, some good, some bad, but has mostly disappointed those who expected him to take that mandate and actually do stuff, right? So historical memory law was never repealed. Taxes, which he said and argued should be lower, were actually raised 30 times. Surely Sanchez has raised them 141 times by now. But here is a centre-right government promising to lower taxes and then putting them up 30 times. He alienated voters with many of these inconsistencies, and there was the management of many other aspects was questionable. But the big moment comes in 2017 when the Catalan separatists organized a quote unquote referendum, which was legal referendum, yes, surely illegal. It had no guarantees. So since it was not a legal vote, how can you have guarantees? They can't be. Even the urns in which you would leave your ballot on were like kid you not plastic boxes bought from your typical Chinese storage place. So it was a joke.

SPEAKER_00 25:44

But the international press bought it completely. I remember because I was in where was 2017? I was in the Philippines at this time, I think. And I was hearing all this news about Calonia separatism in Spain. I was like, oh, it's a big deal, it's a big deal. No, it wasn't it wasn't a big deal.

SPEAKER_02 26:03

Yes, and Rojoy was not able to deal with this, A, because he just left it to the judges. And when there is a political problem, you confront a political problem, and sure you bring it to the judges, but you confront the political problem. The justice system would eventually do the work for him, and all of these leaders were convicted because surely they used public funds for illegal activities, surely they breached the constitution, surely this was a coup d'etat. Uh and surely when the socialists came back to power under the current government, they gave them first a presidential pardon to take them out of jail, and then an amnesty. So these crimes never exist on the record now.

SPEAKER_00 26:44

So yes, it was a big deal, but the interpretation of the bigness was quite different internationally. Where of course in Spain was a big rupture of political confidence and those kind of topics. But in internationally, it felt like oh, this was uh a proper legal procedure. The people in Kahala are doing the correct thing to get out of the way. Scottish that was more and more familiar with exactly if that was the framing of it, as you know, internationally.

SPEAKER_02 27:12

Again, I challenge anyone that is listening to our podcast to just click uh Catalan referendum and then just use the word urna, which is the ballot box. You spell that U-R-N-A. And there's so many funny pictures of that because it's a pl it's literally plastic boxes where people would just leave their ballots. Sure, how many people turn out like roughly 40, 50, 60 percent of the electorate which was not a majority, not a majority, of course. A majority of those that showed up, well, not a majority, all of them who showed up were separatists. So, although everyone knows that just half of Catalans are separatists, actually these days it's even less. So this there's roughly a bit more than a third. So the that has also backfired on the separatist movement, which has become more unpopular once people that bother messaging have realized, well, this was a farce. Well, yeah, no shit, it was a farce. You were voting in a plastic box. Yeah, it was by no means a real referendum, but but how did Rajoy manage this? He didn't know how to, uh he just left it to the judges, did not control of the regional authority, which it could have.

SPEAKER_00 28:22

But he did this part. I I'm trying to figure out a timeline here because he did actually trigger Article 155 of the Constitution.

SPEAKER_02 28:30

It triggered it after the fact.

SPEAKER_00 28:31

After the fact.

SPEAKER_02 28:32

After the fact. So you can-I mean, the British know that there is a direct rule sort of provision in the in the British common law system which allows London to directly manage some of the territories of the kingdom under certain circumstances. This has activated dozens of times for Northern Island for obvious reasons.

SPEAKER_00 28:52

Well, it happened in the Caribbean. So, for example, in 2015, recently, there was a corruption scandal in the BBI, and the Westminster took over BBI for a few years and changed government and had a new election. So it happens actually not that rarely in England.

SPEAKER_02 29:09

No, yeah, I was challenged by a BBC reporter asking me at the time, like, how dare Spain enact one Article 155? And I'm like, Well, you're British, you would know because Westminster has activated direct rule over Northern Ireland dozens of times. Plus, you just mentioned the Caribbean example, which had taken place in the British Virgin Islands just two years before this Catalan. So these provisions exist.

SPEAKER_00 29:37

I forgot which one it was, but another Caribbean country too in 2017. It happens not that, again, not that rarely.

SPEAKER_02 29:44

But to be honest, with the international press, especially the center left or leftist press, there is always this suspicion about Spanish democracy, about how somehow the Spaniard guys, like this, all this romanticization of the Civil War, ideals of the left, and you know, the Hemingway and the Orson Wells visits to Spain and how exotic and different the country is or whatever, all of this has stuck and somehow we are perceived to be different then, and we're not that different than. And in fact, like I said, the BBC reporters certainly went quiet when I mentioned the direct rule.

SPEAKER_00 30:19

Yeah. So just to highlight, Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution enables the Prime Minister to get a vote in the Senate of Spain, and if they have a majority of the vote which Pepe control at the time, then the Cabinet of Spain from Madrid can directly rule a region for a temporary period of time. And it can pick and choose, by the way.

SPEAKER_02 30:47

It can pick to rule on every single authority that they have delegated, or just pick and choose.

SPEAKER_00 30:53

Right. Right? So in this case, he took over everything and he dismissed the president, dismissed the Congress in Catalonia, you know, called elections. It was a whole legally speaking, Article 155 was a theoretical argument for like 40 years prior. Because who would ever use Article 155 in Spain was the legal argument? Then for the first time in 2017, since we have a new constitution, this is the first time it ever used, and it was used and very curious how it happened.

SPEAKER_02 31:23

I know this is a very political thing, so it's economics, the economics of it are not that relevant. There was a funny thing here, which is the finance ministry obviously took over the Catalan finances, so it decided to strictly pay what it needed to be paid, like government workers' salaries, healthcare education, the basics, the basics. And what's very interesting is that while the direct rule was in place, expenditures went out dramatically, and no one ever realized, which shows you how much government waste was going to this separatist propaganda machinery that they have, which is consumes literally billions of euros. But this should have been enacted way before. The minute you insist that you were proceed ahead with an illegal referendum, you activate 155.

SPEAKER_00 32:14

Why do you think Rajoy waited so long, especially given it was not it was a popular sentiment to do this?

SPEAKER_02 32:27

Well, I guess he's the guy that just made an art out of just staying there, right? So he was never the superstar of politics, but eventually became president. He realized how sometimes there is an ability in not doing much and just staying there, not committing mistakes. Okay, let them drown. Yes, they'll do the referendum, but it's illegal, so no one cares. But millions of Spaniards, we felt outraged that the farce could be held. And by this, we're not arguing that force should have been used or not. It's like you you tackle this directly from the get-go, and you signify that as long as there is a rule of law respecting government in Madrid, the minute you keep on challenging me with this, I'm going to exert the constitutional mandate that I have, the constitutional powers that I have, and the constitutional authority that I have to democratically restrict you from misusing your regional powers to enact what by God was a coup d'etat. And voters resented Rajoy for not doing anything and just leaving this to like, yeah, yeah, let police forces confiscate some urns, some ballot boxes, right? Let the judges deal with this in court through the years. No. Billions were spent in propaganda for this illegal vote. Millions of Catalans were misled. Well-meaning separatist voters were misled too. This wasn't just an attack on this was an attack on common sense. And uh he didn't do almost anything to the point that King Philip VI, who is the head of state, but is more of an institutional figure, actually had to, you know, come out and give what was essentially a political speech. And today probably remains his big moment, the moment that justifies him for ages, just like 1982 justified his father, his father for ages when he stopped a coup d'etat. Well, King Philip stopped the coup d'etat as well in Catalonia, but then who took to the streets and ran a massive demonstration? Was it Rajoy? Did he like show up and bring people to the streets and bring Spaniards from all over Spain to just be there? No, it was Mario Vargas Llosa, our Nobel Prize in Literature, our free market classical liberal ideologue who was the headlight and speaker for the largest political rally held in support of the unity in Spain, which took the streets of Barcelona just a few days after the speech of the king. And since then, separatism has plummeted. It's falling at 35%. But if you don't put up a political fight, like what good does yeah, the judges will do their job. Thank God we have good judges in Spain. But they just do their job. At the end of the day, yes, they're good, but they do their job. That's what they're supposed to do. We pay you, government officials, to do your job. You have a political pro problem. You can't just hide yourself like an ostrich. And Hoy was so used to just doing like an ostrich, and things will sort themselves out, things will fix themselves out until eventually they don't.

SPEAKER_00 35:41

And this was the beginning of the fracturing of Pepe, where Pepe, again, we've been discussing up to this point. Pepe has been this idea of coherence. It was the big tent of the right, the center right, the Christian rights, the conservative rights, the liberal rights, everybody except the leftists. And then this crisis, you know, there were these brewing ideas over time for the last few years, but this when this happened, this is where people like, oh, we cannot actually be in Pepe anymore. We need to leave. And left they did.

SPEAKER_02 36:20

Yeah, in a way, it is clear that when Rajoy said, if you want to go to a libertarian party, go to a libertarian party. Surely there was no libertarian party at this time. If you want to go to a conservative party, just go to a conservative party. And these words were pronounced in 2006. And the real split only happens in 2017. But you can clearly see how there is a decade of growing disenchantment inside the party. The same leader is in place from 2004 all the way to 2018. So Rajoy is to blame for okay, where do you inherit power and how do you leave? Well, no, not just not power, your party. Let's talk about the popular party, not government. So he inherits a party that is in government, he's not in government, but there is a terrorist attack, a tragic one, and sadly he's not going to be president. You can't just put that on Rajoy's competence or not, because he was just a very extreme, very dirty campaign. Everything was kind of like I'm sure if that election had been held months after the fact. In fact, there was talk of postponing the election, and uh Almodover, the filmmaker, for instance, he argued that this was a coup d'etat. When in reality it was about okay, what should we be doing now? Can we guarantee national safety at this stage? Do we need to hold this for a few months? Polls show that PP began climbing again, so it had a better result in 2007, and then he eventually won by a landslide in 2011. But what Rajoy inherits is a large unified centre-right party. When Rajoy leaves in 2018, there is three parties on the centre-right, and PP is polling at around 20%.

SPEAKER_00 38:07

Yeah. And of course these are Ciudadanos and Vox, which we will get to on a whole separate episode. But you mentioned he left in 2018.

SPEAKER_02 38:15

Yes, but although we'll talk about that split when we talk about these two parties, yeah. Let's just say that in a way the Liberal Party was Ciudadanos.

SPEAKER_00 38:27

Sure.

SPEAKER_02 38:27

And the Conservative Party, that was Vox. So those families or those ideas that coexisted for ages under the PP Big Ten concept. Even before PP existed, Fraga was even manufacturing it, realizing that okay, he needed libertarians and classical liberals, and he needed conservatives, and he needed to create this Big Ten, sort of the Republican-esque approach to everything that is to the right of the left. Should be united and try to coexist. And that had become a very natural political space. But when Rajoy says this, 10 years after the fact, people do go to a centrist moderate party, and people do go to a conservative alt-right party.

SPEAKER_00 39:09

And as we discussed in the previous episode, that was the landscape. Yeah, it's not like it was a new thing. That was actually going back to norm.

SPEAKER_02 39:17

Yeah. But of course, if there is one party speaking with a more or less unified vote, voice, and you run as a single option for center-right voters, your electoral results are much better.

SPEAKER_01 39:30

Yeah, of course.

SPEAKER_02 39:31

But if your vote is split in free, even though percentage-wise, there's more right-wing people today in Spain than before. So the overall vote base has increased.

SPEAKER_00 39:42

This is the point that people don't get about Spain. That's what they think. But then the actual numberical count, there are more right to center center to right people generally than leftists, but Pesobains, because it's fracturing that we can discuss and if that vote, if that's if that split was not even now that the centrist party, Ciudadanos, has disappeared, and that you could argue that the vote has been consolidated around PP and Vox.

SPEAKER_02 40:17

So now there is the center-right party of PP and the alt-right party of Vox. There is a small party out there called Seacabola Fiesta. Literally translates for the party is over. Very small party. And in the last Andalusian election, it won 100,000 votes. There's 8 million people in Andalusia, roughly speaking, forgive me if I'm getting the number wrong. I think it's been 8 million for ages, but like I don't know. But roughly 8 million. One could argue 100,000 votes isn't the end of the world. Right? But because of this party running in this regional election and getting these 100,000 votes, the sum of PP and Vox, although it increased the center-right vote by 2%, it had four seats less in Parliament. While the parties over had no seats. So these 100,000 votes, you might as well just throw your vote on the bin because it serves you nothing in terms of getting representation. This party will likely never get representation. It once got it to the European Parliament and then it disbanded because its members broke away from its leader when he was caught up with corruption practices. There's two MEPs that have joined the European Conservative and Reformist group who are like wonderful guys that joined politics for the better and were caught up with this guy that obviously was caught up by the justice system and now he's being investigated. But the existence of this party, just think of how disruptive fracture is in the electoral law that you just get a hundred thousand votes. I don't know what percentage, maybe two percent of the vote, one percent of the vote. An 8.7 million population. In a nine million population thing. So you have a center-right base that expands itself by 2%, yet you have four seats less because of these things. So go figure at the national level if there's three strong parties at one point. No, no wonder PP collapsed like it did.

SPEAKER_00 42:13

Yeah. And just to make the point to push this point again, so in 2011, when Rajoy won 186 seats in Congress, that was the by far the biggest ever victory of Pepe. It was not the biggest ever victory in Spain of a party, that was Gonzalez in the 80s. Yeah, like 203 seats or something wrong with that number.

SPEAKER_02 42:36

Yeah, but let me tell you, Felipe Gonzalez won every single vote. Sabatero lost every single vote when Rajoy won. You know what I mean? Felipe won the election. I got that, but Rajoy did not win the election.

SPEAKER_00 42:48

The socialists lost the election. But I'm making the point that it's a strength and coherence here. So all so Pepe had not the highest count of seats, but unlike Gonzalez, Rajoy in that time did actually still have more power than Gonzalez because Pepe also controlled all the regions. When Gonzalez had won that massive victory, the regions weren't even actually done yet. So there were no proper comunidades yet.

SPEAKER_02 43:17

Decentralization was being developed on the flight.

SPEAKER_00 43:21

So Rajoy still was still the single most powerful leader of Spain, thanks Franco.

SPEAKER_02 43:31

And yet, and yet and yet, yeah, the wasted opportunity there. That is something that weighted heavily on the conscience of everyone that eventually founded Vox or supported Ciudadanos as an alternative. Vox is a spin-off of PP. And when we get to Vox, we can you know discuss those dynamics with a lot more depth. Where do they come from, who they are. And I think it's likely, I don't want to overpromise that we might. May actually be joined by one of its key leaders. We've had representatives from PP before on the program, but we are also friendly with different people working for Vox. And they have some great people on their team, like José Maria Figaro, who we're hoping to have here on the podcast. Speaks very good English. He's their economics spokesperson. He's their second spokesperson nationally in Congress.

SPEAKER_00 44:21

He's very good.

SPEAKER_02 44:22

And uh he's he's very good, very solid. And uh hopefully he'll be joining us at some point. Um, I mean that that's been agreed informally, but you know, the man's got like three children, one on the way, he's stealing so much, has a lot of his play, but yes, he'll be here at some point, I'm sure.

SPEAKER_00 44:40

Now, I I want to go forward, but go for it. One year is not even that.

SPEAKER_02 44:44

No, no, but just let me stop you for a second. Ciudadanos, on the other hand, was just it was a Catalan citizen platform that essentially its only ideological point was let's defend regular citizens from having to deal with separatist propaganda in every facet of their lives, and let's just find quote unquote common sense centrist solutions to their quote-unquote normal day issues. So it was a centrist party and an anti-separatist party. And then when it branches out to the rest of Spain, it's because it did very well in the Catalan election that was held after the illegal referendum. So Spaniards saw, well, PP is not putting up that fight, the Ciudadanos folks are putting up that fight in Catalonia, we might just you know vote for them all over Spain, and others who were more staunchly conservative decided to vote for Vox. Whereas PP was perceived to be as okay, these guys stand for nothing.

SPEAKER_00 45:41

Yes, and because of the uh election system here in Spain, where you have a strong provincial party, it can become a very strong national party, that dynamic plays out. I do want to go one year forward, Diego, to 2018. Yes, and 2018 again, one year later, is also a pivotal year for Pepe again. Because this was when Rajoy was taken out of power via a motion of no confidence, that's what the English will call it, and this was over the girdle case of deep, deep corruption in Pepe.

SPEAKER_02 46:20

There was a few relevant municipalities in Spain where a series of PP representatives had created a scheme to essentially just get kickbacks. Kickbacks, yeah. Yeah, kickbacks from public procurement contracts. So you think you're random, okay, we'll give you this contract, but you'll give me 4% of it below the table, right? So this affected the regions of there was some corruption in large municipalities in the Madrid region, also in the Valencia region, right? Now uh this was all worth roughly 30 million, I think, at some point. So it was a big scandal. It had different ramifications, but it was never a national party scandal, it was always a problem of a local party governance corruption scheme. But Sanchez, whose whose party by the way was responsible for a 900 million fraud corruption scandal in Andalusia at the same time, just comparing scales here, but Sanchez presented this as oh, look how corrupt this party is. We need to vote Rajoy out of power. Now, if Rajoy had stepped down, Sanchez had actually asked for his head to stop that vote of no confidence. Surely Rajoy was again playing the ostrich strategy and just say, No, I'll just stay here and this. I mean maybe the vote doesn't pass or whatever. The vote did pass because the Catalan separatists, the Basque separatists, they stand to profit more of a weak socialist government which they can get concessions from just to have the socialists remain in power. Which is what Sanchit has been doing for the last seven, eight years. He's just being everything in his power and more to the Catalan separatists. Today, as we're recording this, he's just handled 600 million more to the Catalan authorities out of nowhere, right? So it's gift after gift, concession after concession, destroying the sense of equality amongst Spanish citizens by having privileged regions as opposed to other regions which are even punished fiscally or in their political treatment by the central government. And this is why the Socialist Party is seeing its vote base erode in many of its traditional strongholds, but as long as they keep these separatist parties happy, they can still form a majority in Congress, right? So PP's PP had a chance to fight this. The chance was okay, you say I should quit. I quit, Rajoy should have quit. His vice president should have immediately called for a snap election, and then Rajoy could have just contested the election, and he would have won the election. Poles were favoring the current government at this time. If he had won the election, that would have been the third time he would have defeated Sanchez because he defeated him twice in between 2015 and 2016 when an election had to be sort of repeated because of no government being formed, and this would have been yet another electoral win. So Sanchez would have probably been definitely voted out of his party now for good.

SPEAKER_00 49:37

And we discussed the Sanchez Rajoy triple election scandal on our longer episode about the structure of Spain in politics. So do check that out. There's a lot of detailed in there.

SPEAKER_02 49:48

Yes. Way more than you need to know. We call that we'll call that podcast, but we're surprised many of you joined us all the way up to the and that's why we love you guys. We love having good listeners like you are. And Rajoy had a chance. I'm not saying this is what you want to do. Do you want to quit the position as prime minister? Well, surely not. Was he responsible for any of this corruption? No, it was not. It was not related to the national government. PP is was in government in 5,000 municipalities at this point.

SPEAKER_00 50:16

We need to emphasize that because people find it how can he not know about his party's corruption? You can't.

SPEAKER_02 50:24

You can't control every single council representative in every single council. What matters is what you deal with then once you learn about what's been going on. But also to be clear, for ages, the rhetoric here was that the biggest face of corruption was the regional president of Valencia, Francisco Camps. He quit his post in office because the pressure on him was just unbearable, right? El País, the main left-wing newspaper, and we have another episode that we're doing taping these days for you about the media landscape in Spain. So the big left-wing newspaper, El Pais, ran, and not kidding, roughly 150 cover stories framing him as corrupt. Eventually he quits. He was put to trial 11 times over this. Innocent of every single charge. Do you think his image has been rehabilitated? Do you think PP has brought the guy back? Restored, cleaned up his name, fought this narrative? No. Gürtel, still today, people think oh PP was very corrupt. And Camps, the Valencian president, was a good example of that. Camps is innocent of all 11 charges that were leveraged against him. All those 150 cover stories of El Paese were fake news. And yet PP never chose to just bring this guy. Like call the press. Do a press conference with this guy. Show the papers, show the sentencing. This guy has been acquitted 11 of 11 different charges. How do you not fight that narrative when the corruption case that was thrown at you? Because Aznar ran against socialist corruption, which was rampant. And the only real significant corruption case that ever affected PP was Gürtel. The face of that case gets acquitted of every single accusation, and PP did nothing. The guy just remains there like he's sometimes he says he would maybe like to run for president of the regional party in Valencia, but his situation has been ignored by the party. The mayor of Valencia, she was also accused. She died. She was an old woman, she died, her name was eventually acquitted of everything, but after her death, and she was a wonderful lady, great mayor of Valencia. I would like to actually pay tribute to her right now. Rita Barbera, fantastic mayor of Valencia, and she died like him, left by their own people. And no one will dispute this. Rita, I mean, who killed Rita Barbera? Of course, surely, disease and her body gave up, but her own party left her alone. After she was the first woman to lead a large city, after she did so much for Valencia, after there was no wrongdoing. We had Aguirre on the podcast. She went through, I think she was accused of eight crimes at some point, even though none of the procurement from the presidential office here in Madrid. She was acquitted of every single one. Still today, you record a podcast with them. Every now and then someone will go, Yeah, that corrupt libertarian. So she was acquitted of every single crime. So PP, you can't do things worse than that.

SPEAKER_00 53:56

Yeah, I I think the especially the girdle, the branding collapse of Pepe following that, they were never able to re I guess they never well, Rajoy at least, and after the part, we can get to the new leader after that, but they never was able to regain the branding of themselves as the competent, anti-corrupt, you know, order type party because of how you know large this propaganda was against PP in the Gretel case.

SPEAKER_02 54:30

When you have judges' decisions acquitting the big faces of PP, then who were the corrupt politicians in PP? Well, one of them was the guy that managed the treasury for the party, but he was doing this, this was his own books. This was not the national party. His name is Luis Bartenas. It was a senator. It was this was one senator. That is the only national representative of the party that was ever found guilty of wrongdoing. And this was all local procurement contests. I'm not saying this is not a scandal, it is. I'm just saying the justice system did its work. The national party was at some point accused, and then that this was removed, and no one was the party was never condemned of any corruption. This was always local corruption. I mean, I know a kid who was the son of a mayor in a municipality who was who's now doing serving time. And this kid, he's 30 these days, he's not a kid anymore, but I know him from a young age. His father was known as Little Midbol. So he was the mayor of a small neighboring town in Madrid, and he was found guilty of these charges, and he had diverted these funds and actually left his family stranded to just go with his mistress and try and take the stolen money away with him all the way to Singapore. Now, his own family had to testify against him. So not saying there wasn't corruption. I know firsthand there was corruption, but this is what we're dealing with. We're not dealing with Rajoy doing wrongdoing with, we're dealing with local mayors known as Little Midbo. Okay? This is not the 900 million corruption scandal that the socialists had in this in Andalusia at the same time. This was local corruption, which is unfortunate, but it was local corruption. But PP never recovered, and no wonder they never recovered. You get the face of Goethel is acquitted of more than 10 charges, is found guilty of none, and you still do nothing. To me, that's mind-blowing. I'm the leader of PP. The minute he gets acquitted of the last charge. I'm calling a press conference, I'm calling every outlet, I'm bringing this guy in, I'm telling everyone, look, everything you reported on these guys was fake. And this party's name needs to be cleaned up. And everything Spaniards said about this man, it's yes, okay, surely there were accusations, but all of them have been cleared. So this man is an innocent man, and this party is a clean party, and those corrupt elements that are serving time, we are the first ones that with distance themselves from us.

SPEAKER_00 56:59

It is honestly very strange that Pepe didn't do that counter-strike when these things happened. But I do wonder if it'd be because the quick leadership changes that happen. Yeah. Actually, just right after a.

SPEAKER_02 57:11

I don't think any leader would have done this. Aznar would surely have, but like all the leaders since then have never had the willingness to actually fight the left at the own game. When you see a dirty tactic being thrown at you, what's dirtier than 150 cover stories of fake news on the largest newspaper? And 11 charges that are fraught and that just drag someone through a seven, eight-year legal battle that destroys your civil life completely, and there's no crimes at all at the end of the whole process. It doesn't get any more dirty than that. But to be honest, excuse me for part of my French, but like no one's got any bolts anymore on that party after Ratnar left. And that would have been the counter-strike, like you say, okay. You dragged our names through the mud for years. You said we were X, Y, and Z. Now what? There was never that don't a moment. Or for that matter, the counter-strike to the vote of no confidence was extremely easy. Right. Extremely you just swallow your pride, quit your job as prime minister, leave your vice president in, who was a woman of your trust. Of course, do it in agreement that she'll call for a snap election the minute this happens. You stop the vote of no confidence, you hold the snap election, you win, and then you go on the attack. Now what? Now what? Now fight the left at their own game. By the way, I just saw that's what she did. Yes. When they were trying to run her out of office in 2021, what did she go? She countered that, she called for a snap election, she won big, she destroyed Ciudadanos by just countering their internal move against her, and they were in a coalition government, but Theudanos smelled some blood in the water and maybe a coalition government with Pesoe could work. She smelled the blood. Sorry, they smelled the blood. Well she saw that coming, she called for the snap election, she stopped the vote of no confidence. Rajoy could have fought this, and there is this picture of Sanchez arguing for why the vote of no confidence needs to happen. And Rajoy's seat in parliament is empty. There is a purse. Google this. Bolso is the name in Spanish. B-O-L-S-O Bolso. And they just Google Rajoy and then just Google Soraya was the name of the vice president. S-O-R-A-Y-A. Soraya Bolso Rajoy. Just Google that and you will find how Rajoy's seat is empty as his future is being discussed. And the only thing standing there is the purse of his vice president.

SPEAKER_00 59:35

It's an interesting note to cap this part off. That last year, I think this year, no, last year, Ahoy published a book titled The Art of Governance. You just had to say that.

SPEAKER_02 59:50

The Art of Governance, like how incompetent was the management of the Catalan crisis, and one year after that, how incompetent was this situation handled? Just to good you think of ways you could do it. He actually just decided to get his govern his cabinet together and go for lunch. Think of the Titanic orchestra. The Sikhishing is going down. Let's just have lunch and smoke a cigar and just then just go to Congress. First thing the guy did, and there's a go shakes Pedro Sanchez's hands, and just the whole thing is mind-blowing. And that's why many voters that PP lost will not go back. The trust that was lost between 2004 and now, that means that sure Vox may have a ceiling, but Vox also has a floor. And that floor is the people that won't ever trust PP again. And this all stems from the Rajoy leadership time.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:43

100% after Rajoy lost the motion, Pedro Santos became Prime Minister. That's a different episode. But he also didn't remain the head of the party. That was done, you know, we can discuss probably that internal fight as well. But the eventual winner of that competition was Pablo Casado. Yes. So after Rajoy, you know, essentially he left the presidency of the party, there was this internal party struggle to find a new leader. And the natural people, the two ladies, there was internal fighting there. We can discuss that at some point. But essentially, a somewhat outsider candidate won the leadership contest.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:28

There were two natural successors to Rajoy who did not like each other and had slowly formed rivaling factions within the party. But again, this wasn't too much of an ideological thing. This was more power dynamics. But surely, one was the I would say openly social democratic center-left brand of PP, which was overrepresented when you compare it to the voter base where center-left voters for PP exist, but that's not the core of the party. But within the government of Rajoy, this vice president, the one of the purse, standing there on Rajoy's seat while the vote of confidence was going on, Soraya, her full name is Soraya Sainz de Santa Maria. She represented the centrist center-left realm. She had not much real support in terms of the streets, but she was a woman who had managed power dynamics smartly. So she had built up a lot of internal support within the government structure. Pretty much a bureaucrat, pretty much a social democrat, pretty much everything we don't like in this podcast. Well, she represents that. And then there was another woman, Maria Dolores de Cospedal. She had been a governor in Castilla-La Mancha, you know, where Don Quixote is from in the Cervantes novel. She had been the transport minister, and she was the leader of the party as an organization under Rajoy. She did have a more ideological background, more of a conservative, sensible to free market principles, more solid in that sense. Had been a good governor regionally. She had served under Aguirre in a Madrid government at some point at a lower ranking position. And she also had her support internally. So the machinery was split in two. These two women were disputing power. So yes, you have A and B, and it seems like it's going to be a fight between the two of them, and there was many people felt dissatisfied as in okay, we don't just want it to be these two. We want something else. Can't we find something more refreshing? I, of course, was brought into many meetings by many people. Uh out of respect, I can't name everyone that was involved with them. But let's just say that pretty every single free marketer, classical liberal and libertarian in Madrid was involved in a little bit of conspiracy in here and there at this time. The figure that emerged as the consensus scenario of what alternative could there formed was Pablo Casado. And eventually, because yes, the vote was bound to be split in two, but as soon as you have an alternative, if that zero sum game between Soraya and Cospedal was not really that appealing to regular members of the party, like people, just regular, like normal folks, not just apparatus aparachic bureaucrats of members of the party structure, but just regular PP supporters, party members. Those guys immediately went, whoop, now Pablo Casar is running, we'll go with Pablo Casar. He'd been a president of the youth wing of the party, he had been a member of the FIS think tank, he had been kind of an executive secretary for Aznar, traveled the world with him, worked with him, learned with him, and he was a refreshing face who was inherited at Destroyed Party. So he wins the internal election. First, on the first round vote, it's essentially the vote is splitting free, but he's able to pass on to the second ballot. And then all the votes from Cospedal go for Casado, so he wins by roughly two-thirds. So it's a big win. He gets a good mandate. He's a young leader, inexperienced, it must be said, sure, because he had never been excepting power in office, but he's pretty much an ideas guy. And I had, by the way, a good personal relationship with with him until dot dot dot. We'll get to until at some point.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:31

Well, we should get to it now. So there this was another PPS scandal, and yet again it's self-made one though. Self-inflicted. It's more self-made. It's 2022. So this was now a uh internal scandal between him, well, essentially the two players here is him and Isabel Ayuso. Yeah. Who at the time was also the president of Madrid. And there apparently was a lot of internal machinations that were going with whispering in Casado's ear. That were saying Isabel is trying to move against you. You should do a counter-strike before that happens. Where did it even come from?

SPEAKER_02 1:06:09

Well, Casado picked Ayuso to be to stand for governor of Madrid. Casado had been friends with Ayuso for ages, since like essentially the university years. Casado and Ayuso came from the same political family. The Aguirre clan, the Aznarists, the Pro Aznar guys, the more like the listeners of our podcast would have been ecstatic that he was the face of PP. Just like the listeners of our podcast probably have a very good opinion of Fayuso's policies here in Madrid, right? So the fact that he would move against her, it's crazy, not just from the political optics, but from the personal dynamics there. These two were friends. But there was a lot of whispering in his ear that this was his rasputine of sorts was Teodoro Garcia Egea, a politician who aptly counseled him on a series of movements that Ciudadanos was trying to do to sort of take over the center right and become the main force of the center right. And PP dealt with those successfully between 2019 when Cassad fully takes the reins and 2021. So by 2021, Ciudadanos goes from being a competitor, a contender for PP, a real enemy, or at least a party that sits within the center right and really challenges its voter base to essentially disappearing. And this same whispering then started to elaborate on oh, but now look like look how popular she thinks she is. She's going after your job, she thinks she's more than you. Surely she was more popular than him, but that's not. I mean, Ayuso today is also more popular than Feijo.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:57

I think it's not the best way to measure things, but if you look at just for example Twitter following, I usually have over a million, Feijo have like what 300,000 followers, whatever. Again, not the best model, but it's a some kind of indicator.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:11

Yeah, or like international press, Google Ayuso, Madrid, you'll find a lot of coverage. Google Feijo, PP, Spain, you'll find very little coverage. So our listeners probably know who Feijo is, or probably don't. I'm not assuming that he's the current leader of PP, but they surely know who Ayuso is, right? So the whispering eventually turns into an internal campaign against.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:34

Do you think that whispering was founded? No, not at all. Not at all.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:40

No, not at all. Not at all. Uh I don't fully rule out Ayuso eventually having a national career in politics. I 100% rule out Ayuso having any political ambitions at the national level at this point. 100%. But what's more interesting is because of my work as a journalist, I received a copy of the I've never spoken about this publicly. I received a copy of the allegations that the circle that surrounded Casado was making about Ayuso. And I found it extremely weak. The case was that Ayuso's brother had received some sort of contract from the region of Madrid. The problem here is that Ayuso's brother had done procuring services for regional administrations for several years. This was pre-Ayuso, and this was also with several regions where PP was not in government. Also, this was the sort of decision where the contracts. Oh, outside Madrid. Yeah, outside Madrid. Okay. Yeah. So this was. So A, he had been receiving these contracts before Ayuso was. So he's not like, for example, our current president, Pedro Sanchez, his deadbeat brother suddenly gets a gig as an orchestra conductor in some place that even that barely doesn't even have an orchestra to begin with, right? So yeah, of course, that's a case of nepotism, right? In this case, so he's her her brother had public procurement contracts before. He had them with PP and socialist governments, and those were basically earned on merit, on public procurement contracts that are not just singled out directly, but rather on a public contest. And he had delivered the services. And of course, there was no any wrongdoing in the delivery of these services. So I found it to be, and surely she was never involved. This was a low-ranking decision. She was never even aware of these contracts, unless, I don't know, privately they had discussed, I don't know, but surely this was no interference from the cabinet of the regional presidency. So everything was done according to law. I also for this and other things, she's been challenged to be like brought to a legal process 18 times for different uh situations. 18 times there's never been a single judge who has even accepted the claims. No legal procedure has even begun against her because this is how ridiculous every claim that has been thrown at her up to this point is, right? But they were the Cassado circle was spreading this dossier, hoping someone would assume it and no one did, and then eventually this transpired, and she learned that this internal conspiracy was going on, and she came out publicly against him, he came out publicly against her, and surely when you say come out publicly against him, in her case, sure she's probably saying these acquisitions are against me are false, but what what did he say? Well, he did he whispered, he sort of made some passing comment as to, well, yeah, I'm learning some things, we are seeing some things in the press that need some explaining when some small outlet decided to publish some of these outrageous, ridiculous allegations, right? And he immediately jumped. So that's when she and her team, her chief of staff, Miguel Ángel Rodriguez, who had been chief of staff for Aznar, who therefore knew Casado well as well. He realized, okay, this guy is gone off the hook completely. He's now making this public, and it's even more ridiculous than we thought, and this can't be dealt with privately anymore. He's making this public, he's validating these stupid reports, and he knows this is bullshit, he just wants to hurt us, so let's just fight him. So she came out immediately, and Casado was thrown out of the party in a matter of weeks. But because every single regional leader within the party, every single local politician within the party, in a matter of days, everyone had taken her side. So he was run out of the party.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:51

How how exactly did that happen? Right now, did he resign?

SPEAKER_02 1:12:56

Was he for like what the mechanism was a congress was an extraordinary Congress was forced on him. Uh and his resignation was immediately in a matter of days. I would argue like 95% of any relevant PP politician has spokenly said he needs to go. Even Aznar said he needs to go. Atenar had been a political father to him, and of course, Yuso comes from that realm of the Aznar free market tradition. Everyone asked him to just leave immediately, and an extraordinary Congress was held to choose a successor, who will, of course, is Feijo, but uh but Yusu did not have to fight much because everyone realized how you do this to your biggest hazard with no allegation and she's your friend.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:40

But how did they so quickly realize it? I mean, they would needed to know some kind of information. How did that happen so fast? They don't know it's not true.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:48

Well, you could tell they had nothing because all of this was extremely weak. Because, okay, if you tell me, like, say I'm uh say I'm the president of the Madrid region tomorrow, right? And you and I are have had a relationship for years now, and we'll keep on having our friendship under this scenario. But now you're doing your thing, I'm doing my thing. And I guess the somewhere anywhere podcast goes on hiatus, right? So say there is some low-ranking official that opens a public procurement contract and you get it based on merit and you service properly whatever you're asked tasked to do, and say that you've been doing this before I become president, and also for other socialists run. Like, how can you ever then tie me into that contract with you and seriously say I had anything to do? When this never passed my table, I never signed off on this, you provided the services correctly, you won't based on merit, you have contracts before I was in everything was ridiculous. The type of media outlet that picked this up was not even a series one, it was just a joke, left-wing digital newspaper that has published so many fake news through the years. So everyone realized, and it's a shame because by the way, his messaging was good, his political platform was very pro-free market open society. He was young, just he was young and charismatic, you could argue. The poll PP was polling at 18% when he takes over. He was he had increased him increasing that by almost 10 points, so he there was a growth trajectory. The plays against Ciudadanos had been successful, and he needs to, he could, he should get credit for that. So internally, he was able to maneuver and make Ciudadanos less of a challenge and eventually just run them to into disappearance, but he made the worst call of his life.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:36

To me, it's also a very curious thing to do, given that you have you are not a powerful figure in the political Spain. You're a part leader, sure. And you're going after the actual governor of a region of Spain with very little like that that power dynamic is always a very curious to me, especially when it's your party, sure, but you don't have a public position with a congressman and so on.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:04

You could tell in our episode with Percivalman, who was a fascinating guest to have on the podcast on the podcast a few weeks back, uh how he wasn't the most comfortable when we asked him about this. Because if you were friends with or friendly or close to Casado, you were probably friends or close with Ayus, and the other way around. They come from strictly the same political circles. They were friends, for God's sake, since university. So Casado did the mistake of his life. I think, of course, we'll never know. This is Hansei 2020, we don't really know what would have happened. I think it is very likely that PP would be in government and Casado would be president today if none of this has happened. Because PP then had to deal with another internal crisis because of this, and Feijó earned a very good result in the 2023 election compared to where the party was. But in terms of seats, he fell 0.5% short of the number of seats he needed to gain an absolute majority alongside Vox. And I think that Casado being a younger, more charismatic leader who had his party in a growth trajectory, if he had not botched this for himself and his party, today Spain would have Casado as uh as president. Since of course, this is just science fiction now. But that is my call. And I think factual history term. Well, many I I don't think many people would argue that because he was finding a way to he was friendly with Abascal because Abascal and him, you know, had come up on the ranks.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:39

Abascal the head of box.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:41

The head of box. So coalition governments wouldn't have would not have been a problem. There was a point in which there was some some nasty words were thrown at Abascal from Casado. They did get into it at some point in Congress, but there was an apology and they meant that things because there was a the human relationship side of politics is relevant sometimes too when you need to find agreements in difficult times. I would have bet some money that if Casado had stayed the course, today he'd be president. It's very now he's a disgraced figure in Spanish politics.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:14

Is he even in Spain anymore?

SPEAKER_02 1:18:17

Yeah, he lives in Madrid, he's involved with an investment fund project. He was doing okay for himself. He did have an agenda, not just a political one, but an agenda of contacts, and he surely was able to leverage the few contacts that still remain loyal or close to him, and he set up a vehicle to invest in defense technology, innovation, startups, and he's a small office, but he's been growing it and he's making a living in the private sector these days. He's got two children. I don't know. I mean, I don't wish anyone's life to be fully destroyed, but obviously what he did was wrong, and there was no room for him to be in politics anymore.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:53

So after Casado, again, this is a tragic story because of course he was in our camp of ideology, of worldview. He also spoke some English. There'll have been a good international English and he you know squandered that.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:12

And you know, well, this is superficial, but people talk about looks ability, and he was seen as a handsome guy, he was seen as uh a well-spoken guy, well-dressed guy. True, also uh so yeah, that there was uh also he was seen as a moderate so if he's the one leader of the charts, maybe Vox can't impose a more radical agenda that some voters may not want to be on the table. So it is a true shame. What happened is a true shame. But there is no right or wrong, sorry, there's no way you can just say there were two camps of this story. Everyone rallied against him because his move was wrong.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:48

Yeah, it was clearly wrong. Tragic story. After Cassado was resigned in April 2022, just to remind listeners, Percival, our guest on the previous episode, mentioned that he took Cassado's seat in Congress and he resigned. Yeah. Funny how our circle, just very small in. It's very full circle. Yes. And so in April, so just after April, Pepe had to choose yet another leader, and they chose Fejo.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:19

Yes, I'm Galician born, I come from Galicia. What is Galicia? It's a beautiful region that every decent human being should visit if they're in Spain. And I'm not looking at anyone right now.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:33

I will get there.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:35

It's mind-blowing. You must hate me. Like, best seafood in the world, great food, great meat, great uh wine, white wine. Not great weather, not great weather. I don't wine. Yeah, well, because a product in me. No, but yeah, two visits. Santiago Compostela is my hometown. We are uh it's a beautiful, it's a beautiful little town. It's a hundred thousand inhabitants, and we get five million visitors every year. Have a wonderful cathedral. Uh and there's a way, the Santiago Way. So many pilgrims come every year. So yeah, there's a fascinating story too. And uh it's a small region, four or five million people live there. It's voted conservative conservative every single regional election since the 1980s. And Fraga, who was the founder of PP, was the president of Galicia since I was born in 1988, almost just a year later, all the way until I came to Madrid. So it's almost the only political leader that I ever knew coming up for ages was Manuel Fraga, but not because I didn't know that he's no the years when he was a Franco Minister, the years in which he drafted the constitution, the years in which he pushed for the transition, the years in which he created the Alianza Popular, the years in which he created a libertarian and moderate circle, the years in which he had launched the popular party. No, I knew the Fraga regional president era. My mother served for him at some point. I have some funny anecdotes, but those are irrelevant for our podcast today. Those are more for the wine drinking at times. And Fraga handpicked Feijo, Alberto Núñez Feijo. Can you do that?

SPEAKER_00 1:22:17

Alberto Núñez Feijo.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:19

That's fantastic. Yeah. Well, Alberto Núñez Feijo was handpicked by Fraga to be his successor. And he came to office in 2008, and he remained in office for more than a decade in Galicia. I think it was almost roughly 12 years. He always won by a landslide, he always won by an absolute majority, and he was a good manager of the economy. He was a true believer in austerity. So alongside Madrid, it's the only territory which has routineusly had low debt. It's lower taxes, but not as dramatically as Madrid. But it's always kept budget stability as a maximum. It's some deregulation on a more limited basis. So think of a moderate, but who always had this intuition, you know, of being fiscally conservative, frugal in spending, avoiding having too much state. There's something that resonates with him, but let's just say softly. This guy has not read a Friedrich Hayek book. Had meetings with him. He seems to be sympathetic to the work we do at the Instituto Juan de Mariana. But surely we're doing a lot of intellectual opposition to the current government. We'll see when we're doing some of the criticism to an eventual PP government, how receptive he is. But that's for another day. But he was called to be the leader of PP because what do you do when the kids fight? You need adults in the room. Who was the oldest, more senior level, more transparent guy that you could find? Feijo. Problem is Feijo was a regional leader. So he never in his life dealt with foreign policy. And these days, if you want to talk about the Sanchez government, you have to deal with foreign policy and his stance against Trump or international affairs, etc. He'd also always talked economics on a narrow economy. Because the Galician economy is a five million people economy, it's not a 50 million economy like the Spanish economy is. Also, he was kind of a very regionalistic leader because we have our own language and some customs and traditions that are region specific in Galicia. So although voters suspect from PP to have a national unity speech, PP in Galicia has kind of a bit of a regional focus. For example, he's not he's fluent in Spanish for sure, but his normal speech is in Galician, and he's especially for politics. He's used to speaking about so when you're like I do my best in my podcast in this podcast, but if I ever sound articulate, trust me, I'm more articulate in Spanish. So for him to there's a small language barrier, there's a cultural. Then also in Galicia, you're like king of the world, but on a five million kingdom people kingdom. Sally, you come to Madrid, you're exposed to you know think tanks you didn't know, like intellectual circles where you don't know, journalists that you have to deal with, you just don't deal with them. So he comes from a small ecosystem and he's been thrown into the lion's den.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:30

Fejol seems to me to be a very unusual person to head Pepe, especially given the I get the older person in the room, I get that, but at the same time, you need to win the elections. And Fejol is not the person I would have ever thought to lead Pepe for to win a national election. There must have been people.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:55

There is a pushback that uh he would certainly make on that argument is that in the roughly 20 elections that have been held since he took over, which include, roughly speaking, 14 regional, 15 regional elections, a national election, the European Parliament election, and some other electoral contests that have happened here and there. So in roughly 20 m 20 elections, PP has won roughly 90% of them?

SPEAKER_00 1:26:28

Hold on, hold on, Diego. Yeah, hold on. For example, it would be outrageous to say Fejo has anything to do with a you sober in Madrid. Outrageous. Yeah, but I'm saying even with Juan Mareno in Andalucía, it's outrageous that Fejo had anything to do with that too. So why does that have relevance to how Fejo can do for national polls?

SPEAKER_02 1:26:50

Well, let's focus on national polls then. When he took over, the party was back down to the low 20s. And if you look at polling these days, it's on the mid-30s, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:27:01

But how much of that, as you said, Zapatero lost the election?

SPEAKER_02 1:27:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:04

Not Pepe or Rajoy won. Well, how much of that is Sancha is just Sancha is just so unpopular.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:10

I get that point. I'm not trying to I'm not trying to say that Feijol has seduced and excited Spaniards because that would certainly be a stretch. But uh I you could argue he's allowed PP to be seen as a more serious shop. He's stopped the infighting, which had been going since 2018 up to 2023, and he's dealt with a very difficult process of consolidating votes when you have a strong, challenging uh centre right fracture as he had.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:45

Not pushing back, but this feels more like uh early or mid Rajoy type beer shit. Well he's also Galician.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:55

Yeah, but so was Franco, you know, so like or so am I. So I didn't actually know Franco Galician.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:00

Okay. Now you know. Don't mess with us. I'm always surrounded by Galicians, even that at work. It's crazy. Um but it does feel I'm not rich.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:08

Richest man in Spain, Amman Cortega. Also Galician. Galician. That's crazy. There is no such thing as the Illuminati in Spain. It's such a thing as the Galician clique. But yeah, like what I mean is no, like Fejos never gotten anyone too excited about anything. Like 100%. I get that. But the party needed internal governance because it was destroying itself. So maybe he can't, maybe there is a ceiling to him. But without Fraga's consolidation work, Aznar's leadership could not have taken place. So even if this is a transitional period, by the way, this could sound this could age badly because if we look at the polls, he's polling okay. He's not polling tremendously, but he's doing alright. So if the polls are alright, he could be in office in roughly one year.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:00

And if we're discounting him right now, we would certainly sound No, but I'm not discounting him. Yeah. I am saying he's in the tide of history. Right. Like Pepe is the alternative to Pesoe, his crumbling and destroying people's lives around them. But but look at, for example, like I have never met in my three years here. I oh by the way, I should say now I'm now it's three years. Now it's three years, yes. So you lied wrong argument. Now it's for years. When I moved here, I moved here in July. Actually, not three years, yeah, but it's like almost three years. So I moved here the the month of the election in 2023, which is Feyjo's first election with as Pepe's head that he lost. Yeah. That was my first introduction to him, of course. But yeah, I've never met a single person on the street or intellectual that has anything worthwhile to say about Feyjo besides he exists.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:02

Yeah. Well, not I'm not really dying to push this argument. So I'm not saying I get that point. Because again, I there is no such thing as an excited PP vote base, and there has not been one for ages at the national level. So one what one could say, well, why not bring in the the Madrid leader, Ayuso? Well, there is resistance against that type of leadership from the other families within the party in some other areas of that. Do I think if Ayuso was the national leader, do I think she would do well? Yes. Do I think all of this opposition is more in is has more to deal with power dynamics internally than what the normal PP voter down the street feels like? Yes, I think so. But organizations have their internal politics and Fejol's appeal may not be there for many voters, and that may be a problem for Spain because we need enough votes to run Sanchez out. So we need PP and Vox to do well enough to run Sanchez out. But at least I think we can agree that Feyjo has seemingly put an end to PP's downward slope. He's put an end to the civil war internally, he's found a way to broker coalition governments with between PP and Vox that regional leaders within the party were averse to. And he's published an open letter to Vox signaling that he's willing to just get these deals done and move forward. And by the way, this has been successful because it has dropped the growth of Vox. So it shows that him being pragmatic about his relationship with Vox, his party's relationship with Vox, that's his party's a lot of favors because if when voters see PP and Vox fighting, they don't like that. They see Sanchez as the enemy. They didn't want PP and Vox to be fighting and bickering all the time. So I think those are Feyjo's merits, and those need to be on the table. Also, if you want some of Vox's more radical points that free marketeers or open society sponsors may not agree with, Feyjo is your only chance at the national level to kind of put a more sensible, moderate approach there. So that should also be considered. But at the same time, he can only go as far as a 60 plus year old regional leader can do at this stage of his life. We've been thrown into an arena where he's never performed, being thrown into a suit that he's never be dressed with a suit that he's never dressed. He was called in as an emergency leader. He did better in his first election. He'll have his big test in a year. So I mean, take it for what it is. He's not going home for the next year or so. So we better pray that he and Vox get the job done. That's what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_00 1:32:46

I think we can now discuss like the future of Pepe. We've got to feel to the current head. We've revealed 75 until 2005 discussion over two episodes. But this point about Fejol, or I should say this point about the absence of Ayuso is probably a better framing to put that comment. Every person that follows Spanish politics, even tangentially from outside of Spain, again, even inside of Spain too, it doesn't make sense how lacking ambition it apparently seems that Ayuso has for national politics. It also doesn't make sense for the internal parties and then the internal faction of Pepe to not demand, you know, but you know, really push Ayuso to be a national politician. It feels that you know the Chinese comment party before the people. Oh, yeah. It feels like that dynamic playing out in Pepe against the population, but also potentially against Pepe's own future as well. The lack of Ayuso on national stage is it belies all logic that anyone can kind of consider.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:11

Yes, if you were a marketing agency, right? Any kind of person, yeah. Especially a marketing agency. Yeah, you were hired to assess the electoral prospects of a popular party. You would you one could argue the individual with the most political equity 100% it's Isabel Diazou. Like no, there's no disputing that.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:30

And before you go on, I want to make a point. I can't think of any other country that I know about where the most popular person of that party isn't the person in charge of the party, by the way.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:43

Yes. And yeah, who else could who else is there out there? Well, there is a similar profile to Feijo, but in the sense that he's senior, uh good manager, but has a stronger profile, but he's way more of an unknown figure. This is Jorge Azcón, the president of Aragon, one of the founding kingdoms of Spain, Aragon. He has a more ideological stance, he's very sympathetic to you know the general ideas of classical liberalism and general conservative principles. But he just got re-elected, so if Fejol fails, God knows we we can't fail in the next election. We need PP and box to win. We need Sanchez out 100%. But if there is someone coming after Feijo, Azcon could be that hidden figure that people don't know of. The mayor of Madrid, by the way, the first person to ever speak about the mayor of Madrid in the press is the one speaking right now. So the mayor of Madrid is seen as this charismatic mayor who gets things done on the capital city. People like that he doesn't take himself very seriously, and so he's charismatic and he has very good self-deprecrating humor, and charisma is part of politics. He's well managing the city, his legal since you're doing your legal studies, extraordinary, he's extraordinary there. He did waver a little bit with the Casado and Ayuso bit. He did take a few more days to say something than I think he should have. But in any case, he's managing the city very well, and he would be a natural candidate. And I think some people are don't bring his name up when this conversation, and I think he's such a natural candidate as well. A user could be, but to be honest, you have to want it. I don't think she really wants it. Shocking. I know, but not everyone is power hungry, and not everything is about politics. And I some of her privacy, I mean, I don't want to get too much too much into personal life details, but what I'm about to share is known, so I'm not betraying anyone's trust here. She's wanted to be a mother, and she's lost I think a baby twice now. So she suffered a natural cause of abortion, at least once, and if I'm not mistaken, this has happened twice to her. And also her couple, the man that her boyfriend. Her boyfriend, yeah. He's been targeted by the tax authorities in a case that even took the state attorney out of his position because of a corrupt practice of leaking the private investigation against this.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:23

Yeah, the state attorney was disbarred temporarily for the fraud that they'd done. Well, not fraud, but illegal practices they did to get a youthful boyfriend in court.

SPEAKER_02 1:37:32

They just wanted to get his tax record to try and make a claim. And by the way, all this is all stemming from a private issue. He's a private citizen, and this private dispute with the tax authorities comes years before he dates her. So that has taken a toll on her. Of course, I don't want to talk about personal life, but of course, if you want to be a mother and you lose your child, like that leaves at all. She's spoken honestly and openly about how she has found Christian faith, which she didn't have before. And uh, you know, suffering is part of people's journeys to religion. I'm not saying it's the only one, but especially at an elder age, I'm not talking about like everyone makes their own choices, I'm just saying if she's saying all of this, you can clearly see that she has other things going on in her head and heart right now than national politics. So, as much as libertarians would like it, that is something that needs to be addressed. She may just not want it.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:29

But again, Diego, it's not. I know you I know you can't.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:32

We can't go, wait, you would not as much as you would like it, we can't just go put a gun to her head and make her run for the party's office.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:39

I'm aware. But I'm making the point, it's not just libertarians, it is almost like all young people. It's almost um, you know, most sane people, most people working in companies. This is again this is the surprise people don't understand. Because she's not it's not like she's not in politics. If she was a private like CEO of some company, yeah, people are like, oh, she should run. Okay, it's a different dynamic, but she is the head of the most important city in Spain. So it's not region in Spain.

SPEAKER_02 1:39:13

Oh, but by the way, the the head of the Andalusian government was the other rumored candidate. Yeah, but he's also and he did poorly a few days ago in a regional election.

SPEAKER_00 1:39:23

Uninteresting as well. Yeah, but the point I'm making is she's not that far removed from this position, really and truly. I know, but that is so this is why people get a bit hard. If she really doesn't want the power, don't be in politics. Again, this is the dynamics people think about, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:39:40

Years ago, the same things were said about Aguirre. And she never challenged Rajoy because the party machinery was controlled by Rajoy. So why fight?

SPEAKER_00 1:39:53

But but but that's the difference. She may have been thinking of a calculation and decided she couldn't win. Yeah. But is that Ayuso case or should they even want to calculate? That's the question.

SPEAKER_02 1:40:06

If I usually, for example, she surely would not have replaced Casado at this point. Sure. Because the fighting was between them. Now everyone took her side, but that doesn't mean automatically you become the head of the party. That move would have made sense. Should Feijho have been a transitional president until the 2023 election did very well, then he could have retired. Congress could have been held once it became apparent that Sanchez would strike a deal with the devil and ever and whatnot and keep his horrible government going. And then could she have run if it wasn't fully open Congress where everyone could join? Would she have wanted to run? Would people have convinced her to run? I I don't know, but this could be one of the biggest what ifs in European politics. Because especially when you remember Boris Johnson was asked to run and begged to run, and it took him ages to run. Yeah. Maybe it's that case, and maybe it's always going to be a what if.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:01

I mean, you're not ready to accept that, but I'm talking about. It's definitely going to be a what if, but this is again, this is the weird tension that I think is at the heart of this kind of conversation, Pepe today, especially with the intellectual crowd that you're listening to podcasts. Yeah. The most popular politician in Spain, the most well-known Spanish politician out besides Sanchez today, um it's not the opposition leader.

SPEAKER_02 1:41:33

If sports analogy, you have a Cristiano Ronaldo, you don't bench him. You have a Lionel Messi, you don't bench him. You have a tennis tournament, you want Nadal Yokovic or Federer to be playing in it.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:47

And again, it's not like Ayusa is a private citizen or the head of a small region in Extremadura, Madrid. And she is actually charging hard against Sanchez. She is the most vocal, by far more than Fejo.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:07

Well, she is the fact that our opposition leader. Exactly. Yeah, so it wouldn't be a stretch.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:12

So again, this is the shocking thing of Pepe today that this is the case.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:17

And I guess we will have to wait this through. And there will likely be an election as late as possible because Sanchez will push this all the way to the end. So I think legally he can get it to September, October 2017. In principle, it should be July, but there's like 2027. Yeah, 2027. So what did I say? 2017. Oh, yeah, sorry. No, I wish we could just go back to 2017. But no, no. 2027, mid-year, early fall. There needs to be an election. Sanchez wants to push that election as much as he wants. His wife is under investigation. His brother is under investigation. His party is under investigation. His ministers are under investigation. His party secretaries are under investigation. Everyone but his mother is under investigation. So he wants to delay, delay, delay. He also wants to survive, survive, survive, for which he will try to create the broadest coalition possible. And do not discount him making a not a victory he'll surely lose, but having just enough seats to survive. I wouldn't completely rule that out. Bad as he is, because he can get the separatists. He doesn't care, he doesn't have morals, he doesn't have ethics. So he can just call for a popular front, like they call it, and just unite all separatists and communists and radicals and socialists and everyone and their mother to run under the same banner. Because if they do, the electoral law will give them a premium, then they can split the money. If we steal the bank together, then we can steal the money. If we don't bunch together, we don't stand a chance. So let's just go steal the bank, then we'll talk about how to split the money. And that's what I think they're aiming for. And so do not discount him out completely. Never count him out. I want to make a very nasty comparison, but it's been said that Coke Roaches survive nuclear attacks. So just saying.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:32

On that point of status, I want to mainly point that. So Pepe describes itself. Isn't it part of the point? So you have this idea, you know, Pepe is a big tank party, the conservative, liberal, libertarians, all that nice stuff. So in their national strategy, put it that way, that was launched last year at their last Congress, it's in 2025, so they describe themselves, I'm reading here page eight. The Partido Popular, the Popular Party is a party of reformist center. Centre reformista. That's a term they use. It means absolutely nothing.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:20

Yeah. But they've been using that for ages, using that for ages.

SPEAKER_00 1:45:24

They're still using it. So even now, like there when you have a leader that doesn't have any particular ideology, when you have a national polity platform that has literally no direction, and you self-describe yourself still as a central reformista party, yeah, the only thing to think of is we're just not going to be Sanchez. And it's interesting to use that playbook today in 2026 going into 2027. And you know, it it's again still the most successful center-right party in Europe by any metric, but the dynamics are and I think we can wrap it there.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:14

But we will continue to talk about PP a lot on the podcast whenever we speak about Spanish affairs, because it's the biggest party in the nation. It holds a majority of regional power, a majority of local power. It stands to win the next election. No one is uh everyone would bet their life on that. With support of Vox. But I mean to be the most voted force.

SPEAKER_00 1:46:35

So it's it was that also last time, too.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:38

What does that mean? Exactly. That's why I was going. But what it needs is that the sum of PP and Vox will need to be enough. And that is why our special episode on Vox will be relevant because there's another piece of this puzzle, and that's Vox, which is a spin-off or a breakout, breakout group that came out of PP. And that is why understanding PP is important, but right now it's not enough to understand the Spanish politics of the center right. Ciudadanos will be discussed at some point, and we could even bundle it with our Vox discussion because it wasn't more of a five shiny moments, you know, five minutes of fame sort of thing. But Vox you need to understand deeper because these dynamics are here to stay for a long time, just because just like there was a ceiling to PP's support before it became PP in the 80s, now there is a floor to Vox, and that obliges PP to accept that Vox will not go away, not for many times, at least. And while that is the case, they need to find a way to cohabitate, and that's become a very problematic relationship. And what's the endgame here? Fighting between yourselves or getting Sanchez out of office? I would argue it's the second one. But as you see, the dynamics with between PP have been good enough to avoid total implosion of the Fraga Aznar project, but not rich enough to just rally excitement. And I think this podcast has outlined that.

SPEAKER_00 1:48:06

And you know, I guess foreshadow the Vox episode. It's not that Vox is ever going to be content to be the junior party of Pepe. They want to destroy Pepe.

SPEAKER_02 1:48:18

Politics is a zero sum game.

SPEAKER_00 1:48:19

Yeah. So listeners, that's the end of our Pepe uh episode pier. And we will move on to the next party, which will be Vox in the next on our series of all the political parties in Spain.

SPEAKER_02 1:48:36

Keep listening to our Somewhere Any World Podcast. Subscribe, send the links around, and enjoy our company. We surely know that it's an invaluable uh opportunity to have such a great audience as all of you every week. And keep checking for our next episode here on the Somewhere Any World Podcast emanating from Madrid.