Pablo Casado barely had time to enjoy the euphoria of the PP's victory in Madrid on May 4 (despite the fact that Isabel Díaz Ayuso has now become an internal competitor), before the shadow of the PP's corruption reappeared - and affecting him fully. Former party heavyweight María Dolores de Cospedal's indictment in the Kitchen case for having ordered the theft of documents committed to the former treasurer Luis Bárcenas once again puts the current president of the PP in difficulties. We must recall that Casado won the party primaries against Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría thanks mainly to the last-minute support he received from Cospedal, who also aspired to the position.
This Thursday, however, Casado has refused to answer any questions about Cospedal in a visit he made to Ceuta. Instead of showing his face when the going gets tough, the head of the opposition has done as his predecessor in office, Mariano Rajoy, and opted for silence in the face of questions from journalists. Casado is very wrong if he thinks that with this strategy he will get rid of the shadow of corruption in his party. And not only of corruption, since in the Kitchen case what is being investigated is whether the PP resorted to the former commissioner Villarejo, maximum representative of the deep state, to try to silence Bárcenas and prevent him from providing the courts with the documents that would prove the existence of a slush fund in the party, fed by commissions for public works which was used to pay its main leaders bonuses, who considered the state's salaries not to be enough.
In short, it is not only that the PP was an intrinsically corrupt organisation, as proven by the Gürtel's first sentence, but also that it practised obstruction of justice. This is especially relevant at a time when the PP is collecting signatures all over Spain in defence of "justice" and the "Constitution" and against pardons for Catalan pro-independence prisoners. How can someone who boycotts the action of justice, who intimidates witnesses, who assaults private property to steal compromising documents have the slightest credibility to ask for these signatures? How can a party that when it comes to government uses state resources to create a so called 'patriotic police' which, in addition to making up cases against pro-independence leaders, is also used to cover up its own scandals?
And now we are no longer talking about events that occurred when Casado was not on the political front line, such as the Gürtel case, but about events that happened when he was already an important leader and the party was trying, by all means, that Bárcenas keep his silence and not collaborate with justice. A party with this record cannot be the alternative government of Spain, but would have to face a deep process of regeneration. A process that, by the way, would have to go much further than a change of headquarters. Because Casado's silence makes us suspect that, in reality, this PP continues to be the same as always.
