The Peugeot 607 that toured Spain in 2017 seeking endorsements for the PSOE primaries transported three men along with Pedro Sanchez: Santos Cerdan, José Luis Ábalos y Koldo Garcia.
That has been the hard core that has surrounded the president during practically his entire political life. Even before his arrival at the general secretary of the PSOE in 2014.
Eight years later, one of them has already gone to prison and two others were admitted yesterday accused of very serious corruption crimes.
The fourth, the president himself, continues to dispatch from the Moncloa Palaceas if none of this had anything to do with him.
José Luis Ábalos and Koldo García entered the Soto del Real prison yesterday by order of the Supreme Court magistrate Leopoldo Puentewhich assessed an “extreme risk of flight” given the proximity of a trial in which the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office requests 24 years in prison for the former minister and 19 and a half years for his former advisor.
Santos Cerdán, the third occupant of that vehicle, He left that same prison just eight days ago, after five months behind bars..
The case instructor has been emphatic. Even applying the penalties to their minimum legal extent, the eventual sentence would not be less than twelve years and six months in prison.
Pedro Sánchez, meanwhile, remains silent.
When journalists tried to get some answers from the president yesterday Thursday after an official event, Sánchez avoided responding.
His government, for its part, limits itself to repeating that it has “zero tolerance for corruption” and that Ábalos was expelled from the party. As if political responsibility could be settled through a statement from Ferraz.
The exceptional nature of the Spanish situation is difficult to exaggerate. The President of the Government has his two former Secretaries of Organization (his former number two in the party) prosecuted for integration into a criminal organization, bribery, influence peddling and embezzlement.
his wife, Begoña Gómezis charged.
His brother faces trial.
Its attorney general has been convicted by the Supreme Court after participating in a political dirty war operation aimed at destroying Isabel Diaz Ayuso.
And Koldo García, the trusted man who guarded his endorsements from the primaries, the one who led him to the secret meeting with Arnaldo Otegi to agree on the motion of censure against Mariano Rajoyprepares his defense from a cell.
Furthermore, José Luis Ábalos almost explicitly accused President Begoña Gómez’s wife yesterday, Thursday, in an interview for the newspaper The Worldof being personally involved in bribery: that of the rescue of the airline Air Europa.
Some statements that would merit, at a minimum, that the responsible judge summon Ábalos to testify so that he can specify the details and provide evidence that corroborates this accusation.
In any consolidated democracy around us, just one of these scandals would have caused the president to irrevocably resign.
In Germany, some ministers have resigned for plagiarizing doctoral theses.
In France, for hiring family members.
In the United Kingdom, for lying about a party during confinement.
In Spain, The president whose inner circle packs the investigative courts considers that none of this concerns him.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo He expressed it crudely yesterday. “100% of the clan that accompanied Sánchez on his return to politics has ended up in prison. Sánchez is not surrounded by bad apples; he is the bad apple.” Feijóo then called a protest demonstration for this Sunday.
Even from the socialist ranks it has been stated that in the PSOE “they were already crying” at yesterday’s news Thursday, considering the scandals amortized as if they had taken place within another party, in a parallel universe.
What is truly disturbing is not corruption itself, a phenomenon that has affected all parties in democracy.
What is disturbing is the president’s radical, tenacious and deeply undemocratic refusal to take any responsibility.. His entrenchment in power.
The doctrine according to which a president can shield himself indefinitely while the judicial siege tightens on those who helped him achieve power constitutes an anomaly that degrades our institutions.
Judge Puente’s order contains a phrase that deserves reflection: “Belonging to a State power does not exempt from criminal responsibilities nor does it eliminate the principle of equality before the law.”
Nobody criminally accuses the president yet.
But political responsibility operates with different parameters, most demanding for those who hold the highest office of the Executive Branch.
Spain has been a democracy for 47 years. No president has ever faced a remotely comparable situation.
That Sánchez intends to go through it as if the problem belonged to others (the judges, the media, the opposition, people with whom he no longer has any relationship) reveals a conception of power that is incompatible with the standards we set for ourselves as a nation and as members of the European Union.
The Peugeot of the primaries has crashed into the final wall of systemic corruption. But one of its occupants refuses to get off, clinging to the steering wheel, while the engine threatens to explode.