Carlos Iturgaiz will not continue at the head of the Basque PP, and the party is preparing the election of a consensus candidate to replace him. The still Basque popular leader, aspirant for Lehendakari in 1998 and 2020, yesterday confirmed his intention to “take over” this fall, in a regional congress that will most likely be held on the first weekend of November . The former general deputy of Álava Javier de Andrés, now a member of Congress, is Génova’s favorite to take the witness stand, although some sectors of the Basque PP are betting on parliamentarian Laura Garrido

Iturgaiz’s intention to leave the party during this course and not stand in the Basque elections next year was known. Official confirmation was missing, which came yesterday from his own mouth. “I think the time has come. The train was derailed and today it is on the track. The PP of the Basque Country at the moment is a strong, united and stable party”, he pointed out to Onda Vasca.

Having announced the end of the Iturgaiz era, the national leadership of the PP continues to work to close a consensus candidate with the provincial organizations of the Basque Country. The aim is for there to be a single candidate at the extraordinary regional congress in November. The person in charge of the negotiation is the deputy general secretary of Organization, Miguel Tellado, a trusted man of Alberto Núñez Feijóo who will participate today in Vitoria in the regional board of directors that will convene the congress.

The new president of the Basque PP will have as his first challenge to prepare the party for the elections to the Basque Parliament in 2024, for which he will stand as a candidate. In Génova, they are betting on Javier de Ándres, deputy general of Álava between 2011 and 2015 and delegate of the Spanish Government in Euskadi between 2016 and 2018, during the last stage of the executive of Mariano Rajoy. De Andrés obtained the act of deputy in the general elections of July 23 and is one of the two representatives of the Basque PP in the Lower House.

Iturgaiz, meanwhile, is saying goodbye to the first political line after a particular career: he has been a candidate for lehendakari in two moments separated by a span of 22 years and absolutely different for his party. Born in the Biscayan town of Santurtzi, on the left bank of the Bilbao estuary, he took his first steps in the municipal sphere and in the General Boards of Bizkaia. In 1994 he made his debut in the Basque Parliament, two years later he acceded to the presidency of the party in Euskadi and in 1998 he was a candidate for lehendakari. It achieved the second best historical result of the Basque PP, with 251,700 votes, and placed the party as the second force in the Basque Country. Those were years of brutal flogging by ETA, and the PP, with José María Aznar at the head of the party and the Spanish Government, became strong in Euskadi, becoming a symbol of resistance.

Iturgaiz continued as president of the Basque PP for another six years, although in 2001 the candidate for lehendakari was Jaime Mayor Oreja. In 2004 he left office and the party sent him to Brussels. Iturgaiz was an MEP for 15 years, until in April 2019 he announced that he was leaving politics for having been relegated to 17th place on the PP’s European list.

But in February 2020, nevertheless, Pablo Casado left the Basque PP due to differences with Alfonso Alonso and turned to Iturgaiz, who 22 years later was again a candidate for lehendakari. The result was illustrative of the weight loss of the PP in Euskadi. Iturgaiz obtained, in coalition with Ciutadans, 60,650 votes, 191,000 less than those he had obtained 22 years ago and 265,000 less than the ceiling obtained by Mayor Oreja.

The objective of Iturgaiz in his second stage at the head of the Basque PP has been to recover internal cohesion – which he has partly achieved – and to regain the pulse of the party. In the municipal elections and in the last general elections in July, the Basque PP managed to improve its poor results in the 2019-2020 electoral cycle, when it hit rock bottom, although it remains close to its electoral ground and is separated by an abyss of the position he was able to achieve in those years in which Iturgaiz burst into the political forefront.