Until this Sunday, the image of militants demonstrating in front of the headquarters of their own party was exclusive to the PSOE. It was in 2016, when dozens of members rallied in front of the building on Ferraz Street to support the current Spanish president, Pedro Sánchez, in his struggle with Susana Díaz. Six years later, the scene was repeated this Sunday in Madrid's Calle Génova. Hundreds of people – some 3,500 according to the Spanish government delegation in Madrid – have stood outside the doors of the PP headquarters – in an unannounced demonstration – to show their support for Madrid regional president Isabel Díaz Ayuso and demand the resignation of PP president Pablo Casado. The conservative leader is getting pushed further into a corner: the pressure from the grassroots, territorial leaders and the media for him to leave office is growing.

The first wave of the pandemic caught the Spanish health system without reserves of strategic material such as respirators and masks, and everyone remembers the frantic race that the administrations started to obtain supplies from China. In this context, many of the contracts were made on an emergency basis, probably quite justifiably, but with the disadvantage of opening the door to possible irregularities. The Catalan Auditor itself found some of these irregularities in the contracts that the Catalan Department of Health signed, and for example it uncovered that €8m were paid by mistake to a respirator company, and is yet to be recovered.

Pablo Casado was silent throughout this Thursday while the PP was split down the middle. The information about alleged corruption and spying on Madrid regional president Isabel Díaz Ayuso ripped through a party that has now been mired in a struggle for power for months. And the conflict has continued to escalate. Twenty-four hours after Ayuso accused Casado of trying to destroy her, the party leader has defended himself by accusing the Madrid president of orchestrating a "set-up" against him and his leadership to avoid giving the explanations that the leadership had demanded on the alleged commission that her brother charged for the award of a contract for masks during the first wave of the pandemic. "I am surprised and disappointed. What happened yesterday is something I don't deserve. I have been supporting Ayuso for 17 years and I have no regrets, and I am very satisfied," said Casado in an interview with COPE.

The People's Party (PP), the party that governed Spain with an absolute majority during the 2017 Independence Referendum and suspended Catalan self-rule, is today a shadow of its former self. Today it is a smaller party, anxious about Vox, without a clear position on the far right, without a strong leadership and, as of this Thursday, totally fractured into two irreconcilable halves. The internal war that Pablo Casado has started against Isabel Díaz Ayuso, beyond the motivations for either side, is a political suicide for the PP. Spanish president Pedro Sánchez sees with satisfaction how the opposition is bleeding to death in internal fights and that, even when the Socialists lose, as they did in Castilla y León, they end up winning because it is the PP who now has the problem of forming a government with Vox.

"Can it be tolerated that there are teachers with instructions not to let children go to the bathroom because they speak Spanish?". The leader of the PP, Pablo Casado, continues to be immersed in a spiral of exaggeration about the situation of Catalan schools as a result of the Canet case. The right is using the first family that demanded their child receive 25% of their schooling in Spanish to attack the linguistic immersion model it has long had in its sights. This Friday, Casado decided to explain alleged situations that happen in Catalan schools where, according to him, there are teachers who do not let children who speak in Spanish go to the bathroom and who put stones in the backpacks of children who use this language: "Can we tolerate that children who speak Castilian in the break have stones put stones in their backpacks?"

Every time the president of the state PP, Pablo Casado, steps on the Balearic Islands, he charges against the Balearic language, and the 16th Balearic congress was no exception. Minutes after the election of Marga Prohens as president of the party in the Balearic Islands, Casado has made the concluding speech, during which he has assured that in the Islands Catalan is not spoken, but "Mallorcan, Menorcan, Ibicencan and Formenteran". "In the Balearic Islands you don't speak Catalan! Who would think of that" he said to an applause from the audience and after Prohens had highlighted the uniqueness of the Islands and their own culture.

The president of the PP, Pablo Casado, pronounced yesterday a phrase in the Spanish parliament that shows to what extent the Transition has been a failure: "The Civil War was the confrontation between those who wanted democracy without law and those who wanted law without democracy", he said, equating the two sides and, moreover, painting the Republic as an anarchy without law or order, precisely the main argument used by Francoism a posteriori to justify the coup d'état. With this statement, Casado, who was born after Franco's death and has been educated in democracy, shows that the Spanish right is still not able to untie itself from its Francoist and authoritarian past: on the contrary, it is whitewashing it. And, in this aspect, it is very far from the European liberal-conservative formations that, in their daily praxis, reject any pact with the far right.

Isabel Díaz Ayuso has not waited even a week to start the friendly fire against Pablo Casado. On the day that the President of PP has asked the Spanish President, Pedro Sánchez, to resign for the granting of pardons, the President of the Community of Madrid has tried to overshadow its organic leader with an institutional statement - without questions - at the headquarters of the Puerta del Sol in which she has expressed her frontal rejection of the pardons. After the meeting of the governing council, has proclaimed that it will not allow that "companies and self-employed from Madrid, and much less the rest of taxpayers, pay for this party. Ayuso has thus linked an alleged collusion of Sanchez with sovereignism and tax policies of which he preaches".

To many it may seem like déjà vu, but the fact is that today the triple right, that is, PP, Cs and Vox, are once again demonstrating together in Plaza Colón in Madrid, as they did on 10 February, 2019 to protest against the talks between the Spanish and Catalan governments. Two and a half years later the same protagonists (with some change because Albert Rivera is no longer there and Inés Arrimadas missed the plane and did not attend then) meet again in the same place to protest against the granting of pardons to Catalan political prisoners that the Spanish government is preparing. And this is because during all this time both the PP and Cs have tried to distance themselves from the extreme right, but at the moment of truth the Catalan issue brings them together again and puts them on the same stage.

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.

The Spanish right is getting ready for a political and judicial war, taking to the streets against the cabinet conceding pardons to Catalan political prisoners, after Pedro Sanchez paved the way despite the Supreme Court's opposition. Although the PP and Ciudadanos were reluctant to take to the streets and wanted the offensive to be mainly institutional, such as the collection of signatures that PP has announced and the motion it will take to regional parliaments and city councils to force the PSOE to show its hand and thus wear it down, in the end they have finally given in. In fact, the pardons are bringing back together the three parties that converged in Plaza Colón in February 2019, portraying a right-wing front against Pedro Sánchez's government at a time of détente with pro-independence parties. It also adds to the rapprochement between Pablo Casado and Inés Arrimadas, who would be trying to rebuild bridges after having met a few days ago at a meal in Madrid to recover the relationship lost after the failed motion of censure in Murcia, as advanced by El Confidencial and ARA has confirmed.

Every time Spain suffers a humanitarian and migratory crisis on the southern border, a new front opens up between the Spanish government and the opposition. Morocco knows it well and takes advantage of this weakness.  Despite the fact that Pablo Casado called Pedro Sánchez on Tuesday taking an interest in the crisis in Ceuta and giving his full support to "guarantee the territorial integrity" of the State, this consensus has been shattered this Wednesday during the control session in Parliament, in which the crisis with Morocco has come to monopolise the face to face between the Spanish government and the opposition and not the pandemic, as was usual, and even more so after the end of the state of alarm. Although the leader of the PP extended a hand to the Spanish president, he also called on him to rectify his foreign policy and accused him of fuelling the problems with Morocco. "This was the chronicle of a crisis foretold", he said. Sánchez has accused the head of the opposition of using any "calamity" to try to "overthrow the government of Spain". "Not only is he disloyal to the [Spanish] government, but he is disloyal to the general interest of the Spanish people", the president has replied.

The PP's slush fund trial highlights the clash between the conservative party and its treasurer until 2009, Luis Bárcenas. However, in recent years the party and Bárcenas have maintained talks with the aim of achieving a win-win agreement that has not materialised. As advanced this Tuesday by El Confidential y El Mundo, PP lawyer Jesús Santos and a close friend of Bárcenas, Agustín de Diego, held more than a dozen meetings when the first Gürtel corruption case was sentenced in 2017. Enrique López, a magistrate of the High Court at that time and now Minister of Interior and Justice of the Government of Isabel Díaz Ayuso in the Community of Madrid, put them in contact and disengaged from it, as sources of his environment quoted by Efe point out.