It remains notable that Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo y Peralta-Ramos, 13th marchioness of Casa Fuerte since 2013, should have been nominated as a candidate for Spain's Partido Popular (PP) for the Barcelona constituency for the Spanish election to be held on 28th April, displacing former health minister Dolors Montserrat, from Sant Sadurní d'Anoia, who has now got a ticket she hadn't asked for to Europe. And not because Cayetana doesn't speak Catalan and the former minister does, but because the marchioness doesn't have any idea what Catalonia is, even though she was, for some time, married to an upper-crust Catalan who flew to Barcelona once a month to attend the board of directors of a family business which was dissolved some time ago. You can defend "Spanishness" from Catalonia, obviously, but the slap in the face Pablo Casado has given the Catalan PP by flying in someone to head up its candidacy is of the kind which hasn't been seen in Barcelona for some time.
And not so much because the Catalan PP is something minor, which it is, but because Casado is sinking it deeper into the mud in exchange for nothing. Nobody had ever dared go so far from Madrid, but if a candidate for mayor can come from Paris, why can't another reach the Congress from Madrid? Even Josep Piqué, the most flamboyant of the upper-crust candidates the Catalan PP has had who today is solidly installed and married in Madrid, must have put his head in his hands. Even if only because his resignation/firing from the Catalan PP, in 2007, took place when Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo (it remains to be seen if she likes being known by her initials, CAT, like Zapatero is ZP, Felipe González is FG and Mariano Rajoy is MR) had been heading the cabinet of then PP secretary general, Ángel Acebes, for a year and advising him on strategic matters.
The Catalan PP doesn't become more Spanish with CAT heading its candidate list, it becomes more Madrilenian, which is something very different. It was already completely Spanish with Alicia Sánchez Camacho and Xavier García Albiol. Also with its current president Alejandro Fernández and and former minister Dolors Montserrat. But none of them has been able to compete strongly in Madrid with Albert Rivera and Inés Arrimadas, much more media-friendly and openly anti-Catalan, to the extreme of rejecting any symbol of Catalan identity: from its language to its culture, from its anthem to its flag. Regardless of how official all four are. Cayetana, the once muse of Aznar, returns at the hand of Pablo Casado, one of his political heirs, ready to star in an unheard of battle in the Spanish election in Catalonia with Gabriel Rufían (ERC) and Jaume Asens (En Comú) against four women: besides Arrimadas (Cs) and Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, Laura Borràs (JxCat) and Meritxell Batet (PSC). At least the election debates have promise.