Pablo Casado
Pablo Casado Blanco is a Spanish politician and leader of the People's Party. He is a member of the Congress of Deputies in representation of Madrid, having previously represented Ávila between 2011 and 2019. From 2015 to 2018, he also served as vice secretary general of communication of the PP. Since July 2018, he has been the president of the PP.
Biography
Early life
Casado was born on 1 February 1981 in Palencia. His father, Miguel Casado González, was a physician 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 at Douai Schoolin the United Kingdom. He has five brothers.
He started his university studies in law at the ICADE 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 to the public Complutense University of Madrid.
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
He entered politics and joined the People's Party in 2003 when Casado 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, between 2005 and 2013. He made an initiation journey to Cuba in early 2007, 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.
next to Esperanza Aguirre during a summer event of the Madrilenian "New Generations" in 2010
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, 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 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, doubts about the academic qualifications of Casado 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 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 and asked the Congress of Deputies for the confirmation of the parliamentary immunity status 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 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 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 versus 1,250 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 the abstention on the extension of the State of Alarm as party line.
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 reactionary tenets of the Spanish right, including an emphasis on Catholicism, the secondary role of women, a stress on the unity of the Spanish nation, pro-life 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 September 2018 during a ceremony for the opening of the political year, in which he inveighed against the Historical Memory Law.
In October 2017, he vouched for a potential reform of the Organic Law of Political Parties which would include the illegalization of political parties promoting the independence.
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, 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", by "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.
He also voiced that he would like to neutralise movements calling for the historical memory of Francisco Franco's crimes.
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 about. 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.
Electoral history
| Election | List | Constituency | List position | Result |
| 2007 Madrilenian regional election | PP | - | 40th | Elected |
| 2011 Spanish general election | PP | Ávila | 2nd | Elected |
| Las Navas del Marqués local election, 2015 | PP | - | 13th | Unelected |
| 2015 Spanish general election | PP | Ávila | 1st | Elected |
| 2016 Spanish general election | PP | Ávila | 1st | Elected |
| 2019 Spanish general election | PP | Madrid | 1st | Elected |