The Catholic Association of Propagandists is facing one of the most relevant internal elections in recent years. Alfonso Bullón de Mendoza will not be able to run for the presidency again after exhausting the two terms provided for in the Statutes, which set a four-year duration for the position and only allow one re-election. Bullón was elected president in 2018 and re-elected in 2022, so the Assembly convened for July will necessarily open a new stage in the institution.
The call for the V Extraordinary General Assembly is already underway. According to the document signed by Bullón de Mendoza himself, the election will take place on Saturday, July 18, 2026, in second call, at the Colegio Mayor Universitario de San Pablo, at 58 Isaac Peral Street in Madrid. The session will begin with a mass at 11:00 a.m., the electoral board will be constituted at 11:45, and the election of the president is scheduled for 12:00. The proclamation of the new president is listed on the agenda for 1:30 p.m. The deadline to submit candidacies expires on June 18, 2026, at 7:00 p.m.
According to sources close to this medium, three names have so far been put forward to succeed Bullón: José Masip, Rafael Rodríguez-Ponga, and Raúl Mayoral. The race is initially shaping up as a dispute between continuity, institutional reorientation, and internal influence capacity in view of the new power distribution.
José Masip emerges as the most continuity-oriented option. Current vice president of the ACdP, he was elected to that position in 2019 and is a man with a long track record within the organization: he has been part of various boards linked to the CEU, the Fundación Cultural Ángel Herrera Oria, and the Universitat Abat Oliba CEU, in addition to having held responsibilities at the Castellón center. His candidacy is interpreted in internal sectors as the natural path to preserve Bullón’s legacy and maintain the current power balance in the Association’s works.
Rafael Rodríguez-Ponga represents another profile. Propagandist, academic, and institutional manager, his career is also marked by a clear political dimension. He was a deputy for the Popular Group in Madrid and Cáceres, Culture spokesperson in Congress, and a member of the National Executive Board of the Partido Popular before joining the General Secretariat of the Instituto Cervantes. That trajectory fuels the internal reading that his candidacy would position itself in a key closer to the PP and a more political vision of the ACdP’s public presence.
The third name is Raúl Mayoral. Former director general of the Fundación Universitaria San Pablo CEU, former general secretary, and a figure with longstanding ties to the institution, Mayoral presents himself publicly as an advocate for opening a “new stage” and strengthening associative life. In the ACdP, however, his candidacy raises strong suspicions in some sectors, who do not attribute real chances of victory to him and interpret it more as a tactical move: to gauge forces, gain visibility, and position himself to negotiate with whoever is elected, especially with a view to an eventual general secretariat.
The election is not limited to an organic handover. The president of the ACdP also holds the presidency of the Association’s works, including the Fundación Universitaria San Pablo CEU, the Colegio Mayor Universitario San Pablo, the Fundación Cultural Ángel Herrera Oria, and the newspaper El Debate. The ACdP itself highlighted in 2022 that during Bullón’s first term, the public dimension of the entity had been boosted through the relaunch of El Debate and national communication campaigns.
That is precisely one of the points that generates the most concern: the continuity of the El Debate project as it is conceived today. The headline was relaunched in 2021 by the ACdP as a project linked to its history and foundational values, under the direction of Bieito Rubido and with the declared intention of defending a Catholic perspective in public life.
Bullón’s succession will therefore determine much more than the name of the next president. At stake is the future orientation of the ACdP, the weight of its different internal families, and the degree of continuity of a stage marked by the public expansion of the Association, the consolidation of the CEU as a major educational work, and the growing role of El Debate as an instrument of influence in the Spanish media and political space.