People's Party (PP) rift grows into all-out battle between Ayuso & Casado

Months of tension bubbling within Spain’s main right-wing opposition party came to a head on Friday amid fresh revelations that People’s Party (PP) members tried to launch an alleged smear campaign against a rising star from the party’s ranks.

Top brass members of the PP allegedly tried to hire detectives to investigate a contract brokered during the worst of the Coronavirus pandemic in Spring 2020 by a relative of Madrid’s regional president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso. It is alleged that the detectives were hired to see if Ayuso had intervened to award a €1.5 million face mask contract to an associate of her brother.

Details of the face mask contract were first uncovered last year by the Spanish media, when it emerged the contract had jumped the usual tender process. PP officials say that an internal investigation was launched after Ayuso failed to cooperate with the probe, but deny that any private detectives were used.

Ayuso, whose meteoric political rise has threatened to overshadow the PP’s own leader, Pablo Casado, has acknowledged that her brother gained from the contract. But she also denied any wrongdoing and painted the investigation as a political vendetta.

Speaking publicly on Thursday, Ayuso said that ‘although political life is full of unpleasantness, I never imagined that the leadership of my party would act in such a cruel and unfair way against me’ – specifically naming Casado and his close associates as being behind the alleged smear campaign.

In response to Ayuso’s public attacks on Casado, party General Secretary Teodoro García Egea also spoke on Thursday, defending the leadership against what he termed ‘a campaign of attacks, slander and insults’, and said that a disciplinary investigation, and possibly even legal action, would be opened against her.

The scandal comes as the PP is struggling to hold back the rise of the far-right Vox party founded by some of its former members. Vox has become the third political force in the Spanish Congress since the November 2019 general election.

Vox also made significant strides in last week’s snap election in the Castilla y León region. Regional PP authorities had hoped to match Ayuso’s success in a Madrid vote last year and allow it to form a regional government on its own.

The PP came first in Castilla y León, but failed to gain a majority of regional assembly seats. The party is now weighing its options to hold on to power including seeking out help from historical rivals, the PSOE socialists who lead the national ruling coalition. The move could be perceived as a weakness, but the alternative of a partnership with Vox would embolden the far-right and open the party to criticism both domestically and in Europe.

Ayuso and Casado were former friends who rose to top positions at the end of 2018 when the party tried to make a fresh start following a wave of corruption scandals that cost them the national leadership.

But their relationship eroded as Casado tried to battle the national left-to-centre coalition and Ayuso emerged as an ardent critic of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and his administration’s handling of the pandemic.

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