Spain’s embattled PM: the stench of corruption

Spain’s socialist PM is “clinging to a punctured life raft”, said Josep Ramoneda in Ara (Barcelona). Pedro Sánchez’s reputation had already taken a battering from the corruption cases brought against his wife and brother. Now the jailing of his former right-hand man for embezzlement and bribery leaves him more “compromised” than ever.

José Luis Ábalos, who was Spain’s transport minister between 2018 and 2021, was last week handed a 24-year sentence for rigging public contracts for face masks and other medical supplies during the Covid-19 pandemic. His reward for doing so was €10,000 a month, a flat for his mistress and various other kickbacks. The PM has not himself been implicated in the Ábalos case – or in any of the others for that matter – but it all leaves a bad smell and there’s growing pressure on him to resign. Yet Sánchez stubbornly insists he will remain in post until next year’s elections.

The buck stops

Sánchez’s claim he had no idea what Ábalos was up to is downright outrageous, said Neus Tomàs in El Diario (Madrid). Ábalos and his aide Koldo García, who has also been jailed for his role in the scandal, used to sit at the heart of Sánchez’s Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE). So the PM’s excuse that they were just rogue actors won’t wash: he bears responsibility for crimes committed under his watch.

And don’t forget, Sánchez came to power in 2018 by condemning the then-PM, Mariano Rajoy, for the corruption exposed in the ranks of Rajoy’s People’s Party (PP), and winning a vote of no-confidence against him, said La Razón (Madrid). So he clearly has to resign.

The greatest irony is that the man who delivered the most scathing speech ahead of the vote on the conservative People Party’s corrupt ways was Ábalos himself, said Bruno Pardo Porto on ABC (Madrid). That he has now received the longest jail sentence ever given to a modern Spanish minister shows just what a sham the PSOE’s pledge to clean up Spanish democracy actually has been.

Comeback king

There’s still a slim chance Sánchez could survive, said Jason Horowitz in The New York Times. He has an uncanny ability to outrun scandals – hence his nickname: “the greyhound”. And he was offered an unlikely lifeline last month when a judge ordered his wife, Begoña Gómez, to hand in her passport and stand trial for influence-peddling linked to her job at a university in Madrid.

In his 84-page ruling, the judge likened the government to an “absolutist regime”, opining that the last similar case of such magnitude was in the early 19th century during the reign of Ferdinand VII. This has made it easy for Sánchez’s supporters to dismiss the trial as a “deeply flawed hit job by an obsessed judge”. And that it was the right-wing group Manos Limpias (Clean Hands) that filed the cases against his wife and his brother David (who allegedly leveraged his connections to land a job in a city council) adds support to that narrative.

Sánchez is no stranger to epic comebacks, said Irene Lozano in El País (Madrid), so don’t write him off yet. His PSOE rivals removed him as leader in 2016: two years later he had become PM. The fact that he has presided over one of the EU’s faster-growing economies may come to his rescue this time.

Fresh scandal

I’m not so sure, said Guy Hedgecoe on Politico (Brussels). His party is already languishing behind the PP in the polls, and there’s another scandal brewing that could well see him off. It involves his mentor and “ideological soul mate”, the former socialist PM José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who is accused of influence-peddling in connection with the €53 million bailout of the airline Plus Ultra. Prosecutors say he received up to €2 million for pushing the package through.

Sánchez still maintains Zapatero is innocent, but has yet to explain why the bailout of a firm that only has four planes should have been so generous, said The Economist. This kind of behaviour is the reason anti-democratic sentiment is on the rise, and the situation is worsening. “The sooner the country holds an election, the better.”