One day in 2022, Alberto Casero and Víctor Piriz, then deputies of Extremadura, put a name on the table of the management of Génova: María Guardiola Martín (Cáceres, 47 years old). “Monago (president of the Board of Directors), when he learns it, is upset,” said a member of the former leadership of the PP, present at the meeting with Casero and Piriz. But in Monago, Pablo Casado, former president of the PP, gave him the finger for his trips in charge of the Senate to the Canary Islands to visit a lover. Casado leaves Monago politically. “He told him that he loved him, that he was a machine, but that he had to get by, that accommodation would be found for him,” explain sources close to the former president of Extremadura. And from Génova, the Casado-García Egea couple is clear that there needs to be a new air in this community. It was then that Casero and Piriz slipped the name of Guardiola as possible president of the PP of Extremadura.
What did the two Extremadura politicians see in him? Why her? Alberto Casero answers the phone: “A freshness, an enormous management capacity that he demonstrated in Cáceres. Something very precious: he did not belong to any political family of the PP, he had no debts to anyone. His thing was pure management, he was out of internal wars and was not interested in political conflicts. And she is a woman: a woman had never governed Extremadura.”
“It was a shock“says a leader of the old leadership. And here is one of the most recognizable traits of Guardiola: surprise combined with discretion. An orchestra with a silencer. Because to be PP candidate in Extremadura there was another name, Fernando Pizarro, and primaries that suddenly turned to Guardiola, supported by Madrid. He was mayor of Plasencia; she, councilor in Cáceres. Pizarro cannot stand the pressure of the apparatus of the party to the point that, in his resignation, he says that “a weight has been lifted from his shoulders”.
And this weight is transferred to the shoulders of a woman, María Guardiola, accustomed to responsibilities but not to the spotlight, which caused her embarrassing problems (this photo published on Twitter to criticize the fact that the new Renfe trains did not have phone chargers, when they were under her seat).
He arrived at the town hall of Cáceres to deal with economic and financial issues within the PP. It was 2015 and he met a requirement that he would later boast about and that he likes to demand: that whoever occupies these positions knows what institutions are. She has a degree in Economics and Management, a training which has conditioned both her professional career and her way of understanding politics: figures, budget balance and effective management as axes of discourse.
She is neither charismatic nor populist, but her position sharpens (on the contrary dirties) her fangs: in this campaign, she fueled the pucherazo conspiracy, by suggesting rigged elections. This may be related to the event for which she became famous throughout Spain before coming to power. He needed Vox to govern and Guardiola, in his public and private speech, announced that he wanted nothing from the Spanish far right. The PP candidate had defended the rejection of extremist policies which particularly affected feminism and equality. And now the Madrid party has forced her to agree with Vox. She didn’t want to. Guardiola had built much of his public notoriety on a clear promise: to want nothing from Abascal’s party. This was neither a calculated ambiguity nor a rhetorical formula. It was a clear statement, reiterated in interviews and debates, with which he sought to mark an ideological distance and reassure a moderate electorate: “Not with Vox”. However, this ended up making him gain weight.
One day he picked up the phone and called a fellow politician almost in tears. She told this interlocutor that they were putting pressure on her from Genoa, and that at the same time in Genoa they were reproaching Mazón, president of Valencia, for the brutal attrition of Feijóo and the PP for having agreed with Vox. “I have to make a deal with them, but if I make a deal with them, any bad outcome is my fault,” he said. “They make my life impossible,” remembers this interlocutor, apologizing for anonymity, of what Guardiola told him. This was by no means a secret.
The pressure at that time was enormous: it was a question of taking power from the Junta of Extremadura, and for that it was necessary to betray principles and words. “I only have my word and my work, that’s my only asset,” Guardiola warned. A few days later, he only had his job and the board of directors. They asked him to hold on as long as possible. And she held on until a leaked audio recording of Santiago Martínez-Vares, a political consultant who worked with her and is responsible for much of the success of her 2023 campaign, in which he declared that Vox must be “ended.” “He had to take it upon himself, but it is also true that without that, he suddenly felt freer to agree with Vox,” explains a former party leader. “In the end, she is there, between two waters. She is an aunt who was appreciated and who won the lottery with the socialist candidate. Her advisors are nothing extraordinary. I compare her a lot to Marga Prohens. Why? Because no one knows any of their advisors. The only one they know is her. She is surrounded by people who have no political profile. They are all managers. And that, in the party, sometimes doesn’t go down well because well sure: everyone always wants to nominate someone.”
During the Meeting, he took note of the advice from Genoa: it is not necessary to be everywhere and want to do everything, you must do three things and do them well. He will have the opportunity to do so again in power, barring an unsuspected debacle in the negotiations with Vox, thanks to the electoral results: 29 seats, four short of the absolute majority. Vox soars and reaches 11 seats, more than double the number it obtained in 2023. The PSOE falls to 18 deputies and Unidas por Extremadura rises to 7.
She is married and the mother of two children, one of whom recently reached the age of majority and with whom she went to vote this Sunday. She is a “courageous and determined woman, who devotes special warmth to her family and who has a vocation for public service,” said the mayor of Cáceres, Rafael Mateos Pizarro, during the closing rally of the campaign on Friday evening. “You sacrifice a personal and professional life,” he insists. Hers, that of María Guardiola, began to change radically when she was three years old and her father left home. His mother Dolores, a teacher, put everything first. She went with her two children, María and Fernando, to her grandmother’s house in Cáceres. Over time, Dolores married a man Guardiola considers his father, she said Vanity fair. Today he has two new sisters.
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