The brief press release came on Thursday night at 1:39 a.m.

Just a week after the great crisis broke out, the Spanish People's Party (PP) kicked out its leader.

In the night session, Pablo Casado was only able to avoid having to resign immediately in the last minute.

In the end, the regional chairmen granted him a “dignified” exit: Casado had to promise not to stand for re-election at the extraordinary party conference in April.

Hans Christian Roessler

Political correspondent for the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghreb based in Madrid.

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In the end, the 41-year-old opposition leader lacked the support in his own ranks to survive in the power struggle with Madrid regional president Isabel Díaz Ayuso.

Since her big election victory a year ago, she had become his most dangerous rival.

With the allegations of corruption that the party leader leveled against Ayuso, however, he had gone too far for most PP members.

Without presenting any substantiated evidence, he had claimed that her brother had received a fee of almost 300,000 euros when the Madrid regional government bought protective masks for 1.5 million euros during the first wave of the pandemic.

Disappointing result in regional election

There was also the suspicion that PP members had tried to get evidence with a private investigator to incriminate Ayuso.

The regional president acknowledged a payment of 58,000 euros to her brother, the public prosecutor is investigating.

Politically, the popular politician, whose supporters had organized solidarity rallies for her, survived for the time being.

Casado, on the other hand, was accused of leadership weakness and wanted to get rid of him quickly in order to end one of the most serious crises in the PP.

A few weeks ago, Casado saw himself on his way to the Moncloa Palace, where the Spanish head of government is based.

The PP has been gaining ground in the national polls for months.

But she did disappointingly in the early regional elections in Castile-Leon.

Casado surprisingly became party leader in the summer of 2018 after the vote of no confidence against Mariano Rajoy.

He saw himself as a conservative modernizer who, however, was unable to develop his own profile in the political dispute, first with the right-wing liberal Ciudadanos party and then with the right-wing populists from Vox.

The PP collapsed in the two parliamentary elections in 2019.

The party is now pinning its hopes on Galician regional president Alberto Núñez Feijóo.

He is considered a pragmatic conservative.

In 2020 he had defended an absolute majority in the northern Spanish region for the fourth straight year.

With this, Núñez Feijóo recommended himself once again for the party presidency, which he had shied away from in the summer of 2018;

at that time he had been Mariano Rajoy's preferred candidate.

This time, the 60-year-old politician will find it even more difficult to refuse, because practically the entire PP party leadership has already spoken out in his favor.