Pablo Casado's meeting with the 27 ambassadors of the European Union countries accredited in Spain is the penultimate staging by the Popular Party to try to get out of the irrelevance and political mediocrity in which the formation itself, today ultraconservative, has fully entered due to its own demerits. At first, I did not believe the news, as it seemed more like a funny occurrence from El Mundo Today, but I immediately gave it veracity because it was Pablo Casado, who, far from having hit rock bottom, seems to outdo himself with each passing day.
I do not think that Casado has fooled even one of the diplomats who, out of courtesy, will have listened to him while images of the patriotic police supposedly hiding and destroying evidence of PP corruption came to their heads. Or wondering if the PP is going to vote in favor of the motion of censure presented by the nostalgic extreme right of the Franco dictatorship, which will soon be debated in the Congress of Deputies. Many of us wonder what the host of the meeting —the German ambassador— is going to convey to Angela Merkel, knowing how the chancellor handles the excesses of the extreme right.
Casado says that he has presented and analyzed with the European representatives the health situation of the pandemic in Spain and its economic impact. But what he does not say is that, undisguisedly and desperately, he is trying to recover the credit that the unbreathable trajectory of scandals and corruption in the PP is denying him; or Ayuso herself by sealing far-reaching agreements with Pedro Sánchez's Government to fight against the pandemic in the Community of Madrid; or some popular barons who do not know where to put their heads every time Casado opens his mouth.
This PP, unknown to Spanish conservative democrats, is doing everything possible to alter the agenda imposed by reality. But it does not work, even if it disguises it as support for the European Recovery Plan, as a hollow offer launched to Pedro Sánchez to undertake a supposed and austerity-driven National Reform Plan or as a crude proposal to create an independent agency to control and supervise the extraordinary European funds, relegating democratic institutions and popular sovereignty and will to the role of extras. Casado wants to empty the Welfare State and, if they let him, even the Rule of Law undisguisedly and desperately in order to cover his right flank.
Anyone who thinks they have seen it all is wrong. In the coming weeks we will see Casado, if necessary, doing triple somersaults backwards and to the right in his competition with Vox. One trying to boycott the European reconstruction funds and the governability of our country, and the others, in addition, trying to change the Government in the middle of a pandemic. The height of irresponsibility. Although it is also true that all of Casado's movements also aim to detract from the motion of censure. Undisguisedly and desperately, because the truth is that he is the censored one.
Fco. Manuel Fajardo Palarea, PSOE senator for Lanzarote and La Graciosa.