It is difficult to remember a political death as sudden as that of Pablo Casado: within a few days he has gone from being the all-powerful president of Spain's Popular Party (PP) who had won the elections in Castilla y León - albeit needing to pact with Vox - to being as solitary as an oyster. His close colleagues have, one by one, resigned, fled from him as if he had the plague; the parliamentary group in Congress has distanced itself; the party's regional barons have advised him that his time is up; he had to force the resignation of his general secretary, Teodoro García Egea from Murcia; and the forces of capital, which clearly have a view even if they may not seem present, have also abandoned him to his fate. Casado naively thought that he could eliminate the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, over a case of alleged corruption related to the collection of a commission for supplying face masks for the regional government, and in no time he found he had put the noose around his own neck. And so, tightening it more and more, all he has managed to do is suffocate himself at supersonic speed.
It was clear by last weekend that he held a losing hand and now it's just a matter of the right reorganizing itself as best it can, with the lukewarm Alberto Núñez Feijóo at the helm. He has won all his elections in Galicia by an absolute majority, but Spain, and especially Madrid, is something else. Feijóo, with a reputation as a representative of the moderate right, arrives at the PP at the worst possible moment, when authority and discipline are at abysmal levels and when the objective really should be reducing Vox to a minimum expression, given that that far-right is electorally rampant and its sees the PP crisis as an opportunity to gain an even more advantageous position on the complicated electoral map. So much so that some polls this weekend, showing the PP vote as having collapsed, were already venturing to forecast that the far right might overtake them.
It remains to be seen what slice of the pie the president of the Community of Madrid will aspire to, when she is, in fact, the one who has ended up overthrowing Casado. Ayuso announced that she does not aspire to occupy his office, which does not mean that she is content with anything or that Feijóo can happily do without her. Among other things, because she has enough budget to be able to work wonders in the Madrid right-wing newspapers: on front pages, in editorials and in news. The same goes for radio and television. The most likely is that, with Casado gone, Ayuso will be in no hurry and will ally with Feijóo, something advantageous for both of them. In the meantime, she will have to resolve three issues: get the anti-corruption prosecutors to close the investigation they have opened against her brother on the matter of the masks; obtain the presidency of the PP in Madrid, which with Casado present eluded her until the calling of the party congress; and repeat the results of the last elections in the Community of Madrid. Once these three issues are properly secured, we will see which political course she charts.
With the map on the Spanish right having been clarified in just a few days, it remains to be seen whether Pedro Sánchez wants to take advantage of it, as some believe, or if he will stick to the planned election calendar. With former guru Iván Redondo at his side, today the government palace would be full of endless journeys upstairs and down with opinion polls under his arm. Who knows if there would be no better time, with the PP and Unidas Podemos out of play and opening a contention between the PSOE and Vox. No doubt the temptation has proposed itself, but it is also true that now politics is much more volatile than it used to be and calling a snap election is a pact with the devil. And it is also true that, today, Pedro Sánchez is not the politician who wrote his Manual de resistencia in 2019, in which he told how he was expelled from the party, how he audaciously returned with the support of the rank-and-file and how he won the prime minister's job with promises to the Catalan pro-independence parties that were never kept.