As Giulio Andreotti, surely the politician who had the most vendettas in Italian politics in the 20th century, reportedly said that in the profession you have "friends, enemies and party colleagues", and that those last are always the most dangerous. The political career of the president of the Community of Madrid, Cristina Cifuentes, had been in an vegetative state for weeks. Everyone in the Spanish capital knew it over the series of lies and falsehoods over her fictitious master's from King Juan Carlos University.
Very good journalistic work by ElDiario.es had cornered Cifuentes until she was left without political oxygen and the career of the contender to succeed Mariano Rajoy, in competition with his deputy prime minister, Soraya Sánez de Santamaría, and the Galician leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, had been turned all upside down. Cifuentes aimed high, very high, and that has to be one of the key of her sudden political death this Wednesday.
In a serious country, the affair of the master's would have been enough for her resignation. But in today's Spain, slit open by the disrepute abroad afforded it by the invention of the whole so-called legal dossier on Puigdemont, with multiple holes due to PP's corruption, in which some support the disgrace of others, it clearly wasn't enough.
The state's secret cesspit has had to finish off the task bringing back a video from seven years ago in which Cifuentes appears robbing 40€ (£35, $49) of face cream from a supermarket. It wasn't enough. The creams were missing. Too much shame already accumulated for someone who was clearly a political corpse.
In short, the proof of how party colleagues are moved aside. Note should be taken.
And, in all this, Rajoy, granite-like, presiding over the duel: "She's done what she had to do. She was obliged to resign." Once again, the Mariano method: alea jacta est.