Spain’s PM Sánchez could quit after far-right
attacks on wife and bid to ‘politically kill’ him
Socialist prime minister poised to decide on his
future, but some say it’s ploy to survive
Sam Jones
in Madrid
Sun 28 Apr
2024 05.00 BST
On Monday,
Pedro Sánchez, the great and unpredictable survivor of Spanish politics, and a
leader who has seen off more than his fair share of rivals, critics and
adversaries, will reveal whether or not he intends to carry on as prime
minister.
The
announcement will come five days after the socialist prime minister shocked
Spain by posting a four-page cri de coeur on social media in which he said that
the continuing “harassment and bullying operation” being waged against him and
his wife by his political and media opponents had led him to cancel his public
duties for the rest of the week while he reflected on his future.
Hours
earlier, a Madrid court had said it had opened a preliminary investigation into
Sánchez’s wife, Begoña Gómez, “for the alleged offence of influence peddling
and corruption”. The investigation followed a complaint from the pressure group
Manos Limpias (Clean Hands), a self-styled trade union with far-right links
that has a long and familiar history of using the courts to pursue those it
deems to pose a threat to Spain’s democratic interests.
“Now that
we’ve reached this point, the question I quite legitimately ask myself is: is
it all worth it? I sincerely don’t know,” the prime minister wrote in his
letter. “I need to stop and think about it.”
Sánchez
insisted on his wife’s innocence and openly accused the conservative People’s
party (PP) and the far-right Vox party of colluding with Manos Limpias and
hostile sections of the media in an attempt to bring about his “personal and
political collapse” by attacking his wife.
Sánchez’s
letter – which he is understood to have written himself and without consulting
his advisers – has been described by his allies as a deeply personal measure of
last resort from a man sick of the attacks on his wife, which have escalated
over recent years.
“We often
forget that there are people behind politicians,” he wrote. “I’m not all
embarrassed to say that I’m a man who’s deeply in love with his wife and who
has to live with the helplessness of seeing all the mud that’s slung at her
every single day.”
Mud may be
a polite choice of words. Among the rumours that rightwing and far-right types
have tried to spread about Gómez are that she is a trans woman, that she is
involved in drug trafficking in Morocco and that her family runs a prostitution
ring.
On Friday,
two Spanish papers – La Vanguardia and ElDiario.es – published audio and
transcripts of a 2014 meeting between a senior PP minister and José Manuel
Villarejo, a former police inspector accused of spying on, and working to
discredit, some of Spain’s most high-profile politicians. In the recordings,
the two men discuss plans to spy on Gómez’s father in order to “politically
kill” Sánchez. During the conversation, Villarejo also mentions that he is
“directing” the activities of Manos Limpias.
Sánchez
himself is well used to the crude cut and thrust of Spanish politics, a
ruthless arena whose language and personal barbs would be far beyond the pale
in the House of Commons. He also knows how to give as good as he gets.
But his
reliance on the support in Congress of Basque and Catalan nationalists – not to
mention the deeply controversial and divisive Catalan amnesty deal that brought
him back into office after last year’s inconclusive general election – has made
him an easy and irresistible target for his opponents’ invective.
The former
PP leader Pablo Casado deployed a series of unflattering descriptions of
Sánchez, calling him a “traitor”, a “felon”, a “compulsive liar”, a “squatter”
and a “catastrophe”.
Others have
been equally forthright. A judge called Sánchez a “psychopath without ethical
limits”, while Vox’s leader, Santiago Abascal, has muttered darkly about the
day when Spaniards would want to see the prime minister “strung up by his
feet”.
Bluntest of
all, as ever, was Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the populist PP president of the Madrid
region and a committed foe of the prime minister, who has accused him of
enacting a “totalitarian” project and ushering in “a dictatorship through the
back door”.
During last
November’s investiture debate, Ayuso took exception to a jibe Sánchez made
about her family – namely, her brother’s alleged business dealings during the
Covid pandemic - and was caught on camera calling the prime minister a “hijo de
puta”, which could politely be translated as a son of a bitch.
A few
months after becoming prime minister in 2018, Sánchez joked about how he was
seen by the PP. “I know you think I’m a dangerous, extreme leftwinger who’s
trying to break Spain apart,” he said. “I know that everything I do, and
everything my government does, is illegal, immoral and even fattening.”
Almost six
years on, the mood is far uglier and the laughs in shorter supply. The Catalan
amnesty deal has incensed elements of the right and far right, and there have
been clashes between riot police and fascists and neo-fascists outside the
socialists’ Madrid headquarters.
An effigy
of Sánchez was also beaten by protesters during a New Year’s Eve protest in the
capital.
Although
Manos Limpias admitted on Thursday that its complaint against Gómez could be
based on incorrect media reports, the ultra-conservative, ultra-Catholic Hazte
Oír (Make Yourself Heard) group lodged a new criminal complaint against her for
alleged influence-peddling a day later.
The prime
minister’s supporters insist that Sánchez’s letter is proof that he is not the
machiavellian political machine his detractors would suggest; rather that he is
simply a devoted husband at the end of his tether. Such suggestions have failed
to impress the PP, which has accused Sánchez of melodrama and trying to play
the victim.
“The prime
minister of Spain can’t throw a teenage fit so that people line up to tell him
not to be upset and to carry on,” the party’s leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo,
said on Thursday. “Being prime minister is more serious than that.”
Despite a
well-deserved reputation as a gambler and a very shrewd political operator –
and despite the contortions that have kept him in the Moncloa palace – Sánchez
claims he is not the power-mad leader his enemies would have people believe.
“For all
the caricatures the right and the far right have tried to force on me, I’ve
never been attached to power,” he wrote towards the end of Wednesday’s letter.
“What I am attached to is duty, political commitment and public service.”
Thousands
of people gathered outside the socialists’ Madrid offices on Saturday to show
their support for Sánchez. Some carried party flags, others placards reading,
“Stay!” and “Yes, Sánchez, carry on!”. Inside, the party’s federal committee
assembled and called on the prime minister to continue in office.
If Monday’s
decision remains a mystery – will Sánchez go? Will he submit to a confidence
vote? Will Spain head to the polls in July to vote in its sixth general
election in nine years? – the one certainty is Sánchez’s characteristic
unpredictability.
After being
defenestrated by his own party in 2016 for refusing to facilitate another
corruption-mired PP government, Sánchez regained the leadership seven months
later and the following year became the first Spanish party leader to
successfully topple a government using a motion of no confidence.
Not for
nothing did Sánchez call his 2019 memoir Manual de resistencia (Resistance
Manual).
The
question now is whether resistance in a divided Spain and amid an increasingly
poisonous political atmosphere is futile – or still worthwhile.
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