Pablo Casado Blanco

Pablo Casado Blanco (; born 1 February 1981) is a Spanish former politician. He was a member of the Congress of Deputies representing Madrid until 4 April 2022, having previously represented Ávila between 2011 and 2019. From 2015 to 2018, he also served as vice secretary general of communication of the People's Party (PP). From July 2018 until April 2022, he was the president of the PP.

Biography

Early life

Casado was born on 1 February 1981 in Palencia. His father, Miguel Casado González, was a doctor and his mother, Esther Blanco Ruiz, a nursing university professor. His family owns an ophthalmologic clinic in his native city. He studied at the ''Colegio Castilla'', managed by the Marist Brothers, and took the 8th year of the General Basic Education (EGB) at Douai School
in the United Kingdom. He has five brothers.

He started his university studies in law at the ICADE (a centre located in Madrid and integrated within the Universidad Pontificia Comillas) in 1999, but he switched to another centre in 2004, enrolling in the CES Cardenal Cisneros, a privately managed centre owned by a foundation of the Community of Madrid and attached (for the purpose of the issuance of the degree) to the public Complutense University of Madrid (UCM).

Casado later falsely claimed to have earned a postgraduate degree at Harvard University; he had in fact attended a four-day course in 2008 at IESE Business School's Madrid campus. No academic requirements were needed to attend the course, and attendance was the only requirement for completion.

Start of political career

Casado entered politics and joined the People's Party (PP) in 2003 when he was still a student.

He presided over the regional branch of the PP's youth organization in the Community of Madrid, known as the New Generations (NNGG), between 2005 and 2013. He made an initiation journey to Cuba in early 2007 (similar to the 2012 travel by his right-hand in the Madrilenian NNGG Ángel Carromero), where he met with Cuban dissidents such as Oswaldo Payá. He left written testimony of it in pieces published in '' Libertad Digital'' and ''El Mundo''.

In 2007, he was included as candidate in the PP list for the election to the Assembly of Madrid; he became a member of the 8th term of the regional legislature (in June), where he held the functions of spokesman in the parliamentary Commission of Justice and Public Administrations and assistant spokesman in the Commission of Budget and Finance.

He finally obtained his degree in law in the CES Cardenal Cisneros in September 2007 after having reportedly passed half of the credits of the 5-year licenciature in four months of that year. He also claims to have a BA in Business Administration and Management and an MA in Administrative Law from the King Juan Carlos University. The latter degree is a source of significant controversy, as Casado was found to have obtained it from the now controverted School of Administrative Law of that university without ever attending any class, taking any test, and turning in a final dissertation.

He resigned as regional legislator in July 2009. In June 2009 Casado married Isabel Torres Orts; the couple have a daughter Paloma and a son Pablo. Isabel Torres is from a wealthy industrial family in Elche, and works as a psychologist in a private clinic in Madrid.

Between 2009 and 2012 he directed the office of former Prime Minister José María Aznar. During this period, in 2010, he became one of the founders (along with Carlos Bustelo, Rafael Bardají and Enrique Navarro Gil) of the Friends of Israel Initiative think tank.

National MP

He was included as candidate in the PP list for the constituency of Ávila in the November 2011 general election and became a member of the Congress of Deputies. He was subsequently re-elected in the 2015 and 2016 general elections.

He was designated spokesman of the Campaign Committee of the PP for the local and regional elections of May 2015. Later, in June 2015, he was appointed vice secretary general of communication of the PP by the party president Mariano Rajoy.

On 9 October 2017, Casado made a comment about the former President of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, alluding that should Puigdemont declare Catalan independence, he could end up like Lluís Companys, who was imprisoned by the Spanish Second Republic. His words were used by some Catalan nationalists to suggest that he referred to Companys' execution by Franco's regime in 1940, although Casado stated he was referring to his imprisonment by the democratic Second Republic.

Ongoing investigations on his degrees

In April 2018, in the wider scope of the ongoing Cifuentes Case, where the former President of the Community of Madrid Cristina Cifuentes is being criminally investigated on the basis of forged documents relating to her Master's degree in Regional and Local Law at the King Juan Carlos University (URJC), doubts about the academic qualifications of Casado (who took the same post-graduate studies at the URJC) started to appear.

Initially in relation of the presential Master's degree in Regional and Local Law, which Pablo Casado reportedly took and passed without ever attending classes, nor passing any test, as he publicly admitted and, later, in May 2018, in relation to alleged irregularities about the quick obtention of his degree in law at the CES Cardenal Cisneros, as consequence of alleged pressures by the then regional president, Esperanza Aguirre on the authorities of the CES Cardenal Cisneros, whose executive board was appointed by the regional government and was presided by Lucía Figar, colleague of Casado in the PP's parliamentary group in the Assembly of Madrid and regional minister of Education. The centre issued a statement where they denied such accusations, declaring there was not preferential treatment on the student Casado.

This later development led to the opening of an investigation by the Rectorate of the Complutense University of Madrid (to which the CES Cardenal Cisneros is attached for the purpose of the issuance of academic degrees) to clarify the procedures about how the Law degree was actually granted while Casado was member of the regional legislature. Similarly, the instructing judge of the Cifuentes Case opened, in May 2018, a separated piece in order to investigate the MA at the URJC, which Casado had allegedly taken during the 2008–2009 academic year. The judge asked for a report to the National Agency for Quality Assessment and Accreditation (ANECA) and asked the Congress of Deputies for the confirmation of the parliamentary immunity status (''aforamiento'') of Casado, the later considered a routine procedure before moving the investigation to the Supreme Court.

In May 2018 the URJC opened an investigation about the title of BA in Business Administration and Management of Casado seeking to "shed light on the situation of the degree studies of the student Pablo Casado Blanco".

On 6 August 2018, the instructing judge sent a reasoned statement to the Supreme Court requesting the formal indictment of Pablo Casado for the crimes of prevarication and improper bribery, after assessing "indications of criminal responsibility" in the obtention of his master's degree. The Supreme Court had evidence that Casado could have received a «favor treatment», but defended that this would not constitute a crime, arguing in the justment, issued in September 2018, that there was no indication that there was a previous or simultaneous concert between the popular president and the director of the master's degree

On September 21, 2018, the Inspection of services of the Rey Juan Carlos University (URJC) filed the investigation that had been opened ex officio on the degree of Pablo Casado. He did it, as rector Javier Ramos reported, because he did not detect irregularities. The university said it had analyzed all the formal administrative procedures of the president of the PP - from his academic record until his enrollment, payments, validations, etc. - without detecting "evidence of any error".

19th PP National Congress

After the motion of no confidence, Mariano Rajoy resigned from the leadership of the PP, Pablo Casado ran as pre-candidate to the primary election to the presidency of the party. He introduced himself as a (potential) leader intending to "recover" voters from Citizens and Vox.

He obtained the second most votes out of 6 candidates after Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, former Deputy Prime Minister of Spain, who received the most votes among the party members with a margin of 1,500 votes. On July 21, 2018, during the 19th Extraordinary National Congress of the PP, a final vote among 3,082 party delegates was held in order to decide the new leader of the PP between Sáenz de Santamaría and Casado.

He won the voting among the delegates with 1,701 votes (57,2%) versus 1,250 (42%) votes to Sáenz de Santamaría out of 2,973 votes, being proclaimed as the new president, in what was considered a party swing towards the right.

2019 election

In response to a budget defeat, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez dissolved the Cortes Generales, giving Casado an early test of his leadership, which was also in the aftermath of the first right-of-centre government in Andalucia.
The election results proved disappointing for Casado, his party losing over half of their seats in the Cortes Generales, with Albert Rivera's Citizens, overtaking them as the foremost party of the centre-right in many regions of Spain, and the new far-right Vox also taking a significant number of voters. A major loss, was the member for Álava, and the 2019 election campaign manager, Javier Maroto, who not only lost his seat in the Basque country to EH Bildu, but was fired for his responsibility for PP's defeat. Casado refused to resign, but many members' worries of the "suicide" that was his controversial leadership, have been confirmed in light of the defeat, as he has now U-turned back to the political centre, placing much of the blame of the loss on Cs and Vox, for splintering the vote.

Casado adopted an active role during the COVID-19 lockdown, refraining from restricting public activities, visiting disparate locations such as Mercamadrid, a hotel, a sheep farm and the headquarters of the association of vehicle producers; he proceeded to criticise the Government of Spain from those platforms. In May 2020 he established abstention on the vote on the extension of the State of Alarm as the party line.

Leadership challenges

His leadership of the PP was challenged in 2022 by Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the popular president of the community of Madrid, leading to a violent internal conflict. The latter went so far as to accuse Casado of maneuvering to "destroy" her. A large number of PP leaders and activists demanded Casado's resignation, which he refused to do. The president of Galicia, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, considered the most respected figure in the PP, said that "the situation is unsustainable, Pablo Casado's reign is coming to an end, we have to make difficult decisions." Casado resigned as PP leader and an MP on 4 April, being replaced as party leader by Alberto Núñez Feijóo.

Political positions

He has been described as neoconservative, as well as close to José María Aznar and Esperanza Aguirre. He describes himself as liberal-conservative. According to José Luis Villacañas, Casado's discourse incorporates several of the core tenets of the Spanish right, including an emphasis on Catholicism, the secondary role of women, a stress on the unity of the Spanish nation, anti-abortion views, and Atlanticism. According to Antonio Elorza, Casado's ascension represents the comeback of the reactionary PP in the name of principles and fidelity to political lineage: the family as a totem, a fiscal counterreform, a heavy hand in Catalonia, a preventively repressive legislation and Franco's corpse remaining at Valle de los Caídos.

In October 2017, he vouched (on a personal basis) for a potential reform of the Organic Law of Political Parties which would include the illegalization of political parties promoting the independence (of a part of Spain).

Annoyed by the decision of a German court to grant the extradition of Puigdemont to Spain solely for the charge of embezzlement in July 2018 (which he branded as "humiliation"), he raised the possibility of abolishing the Schengen Area. In September 2018 he directly ordered the PP members of the European Parliament to abstain in the voting of the Sargentini report calling for triggering Article 7 proceedings against the Hungarian government of Viktor Orbán.

Also in July 2018, he inveighed against " gender ideology", which he described as a form of "social collectivism the centre-right must fight against". He is also critical of the right of abortion as well as euthanasia.

On 21 July 2018, in the National Congress of the PP, he vowed to "reconquer the Catalan people". Referencing Tabarnia, a hypothetical anti-independentist breakaway from Catalonia, he said that he would be "turning the hypothetical Tabarnia into a real Tabarnia".

He has declared the " Hispanidad" to be the mankind's greatest feat, only comparable to romanization. According to Elorza, in his message, void of any criticism, Casado recovers the formulation of the concept of Hispanidad of the 1930s and reaffirms a particular idea of Spain, in which history, turned into a mechanism of exaltation, is used to propel a nationalist mobilization.

The use by Casado of terminology such as accusing NGOs of being " human traffickers" while also criticizing a perceived "do-goodism" in the Sánchez Government regarding its migration policy has drawn comparisons to Italian deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini by Steven Forti, of the '' Rolling Stone'' magazine.

He also said that action for the historical memory of Francisco Franco's crimes should be brough about by consensus, and that Spain should concentrate on problems of the present, not the past.

A monarchist, he vocally defended the institution and proclaimed "I will always defend the King of Spain" in 2018 while he announced his opposition to opening a parliamentary commission aiming to investigate the irregularities allegedly committed by King ''emeritus'' Juan Carlos I that Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein revealed. He has also considered as good move forward getting used to include praises to the King of Spain in everyday conversations and deemed acts such as paying the pensions as a figurated way of saying ''Viva el Rey'' ("Long live the King").

On 20 November 2021, he attended a special mass in Granada in the honour of the former Spanish dictator Francisco Franco on the anniversary of his death. The Francisco Franco National Foundation publicly thanked Casado's attendance. The only explanation given by his political party was that he did not know what the mass was about, despite Franco flags and symbols being present in the church.

On the economic front, he promises to eliminate taxes on wealth, inheritance and gifts, and to lower income and corporate taxes.

Electoral history

Explanatory notes

Citations

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Casado, Pablo
1981 births
Politicians from Castile and León
Conservatism in Spain
Leaders of political parties in Spain
Living people
Members of the 10th Congress of Deputies (Spain)
Members of the 11th Congress of Deputies (Spain)
Members of the 12th Congress of Deputies (Spain)
Members of the 13th Congress of Deputies (Spain)
Members of the 14th Congress of Deputies (Spain)
Members of the 8th Assembly of Madrid
Members of the People's Parliamentary Group (Assembly of Madrid)
People from Palencia
People's Party (Spain) politicians
Spanish nationalists
Spanish Roman Catholics