National
Esperanza Aguirre says she will not challenge Mariano Rajoy for the leadership of the Partido Popular - for now
By h.b.
Apr 22, 2008 - 7:13 AM

The Partido Popular President of Madrid, Esperanza Aguirre, has announced that she has ‘not got the intention’ of finally presenting herself as an alternative candidate to lead the party at the PP congress in Valencia in June.

‘As a poker player’, she said, ‘in order to rule out playing my hand I have to have been given the cards, and I have not been given them’. She claimed that it was never her intention to go against Mariano Rajoy.

Speaking at a press conference with the PP head of Valencia, Francisco Camps, with whom she had a working lunch, officially about regional funding yesterday, Aguirre said that she could not believe that Mariano Rajoy wanted her to leave the party, as he had implied in comments made in Elche over the weekend, but that he should ‘clear up’ the matter.

It did then not take long for Mariano Rajoy to say that he could never imagine the President of the Madrid region to be in any party other than the Partido Popular.

Rajoy’s comments in Elche on Sunday raised plenty of eyebrows in the party, but the PP spokesperson, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaria, considered that he was just showing his authority. PP deputy for Valencia, Esteban González Pons, commented that the party wanted a person to continue the ideology of José María Aznar, and that person was Mariano Rajoy.

For his part Francisco Camps repeated his support for Mariano Rajoy to continue to lead the party, in line with other PP regional leaders such as Daniel Sirera in Cataluña, and Ramón Luis Valcárcel in Murcia.

Socialist spokesman José Blanco considered that Rajoy’s behaviour was an ‘unusual expression of his authoritarianism’ when he said that whoever is not with me can leave. Blanco suggested that the leader of the opposition was hardly showing democratic behaviour.

Esperanza Aguirre went on the 59 seconds TVE programme last night, and said clearly that she would be voting for Rajoy at the party congress. However, when pressed again by journalists at the end of the programme she said she could change her mind – the congress is two months away after all.