Hard rain in Spain

Corruption has come for Pedro Sánchez’s government. While odours of impropriety had surrounded his administration for years, a storm has broken on Spain’s internationally acclaimed leader. First his close ally former socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero was implicated by prosecutors in a huge corruption scheme, but worse was to come. On Wednesday morning as Sanchez met the Pope in the Vatican, the offices of his party PSOE were raided in relation to a different corruption scandal. Though the Pope has a visit scheduled, the Prime Minister is well past divine intervention. 

The Zapatero case broke last week, and centres on the €53 million bailout of Spanish-Venezuelan airline Plus Ultra in 2021. He is being investigated for influence peddling, money laundering, criminal organisation, and forgery. The central allegation is that he lobbied the government to bail out the airline, which represented 0.1 per cent of Spain’s passenger volume. The amount of funding given to Plus Ultra also raised eyebrows at the time, as it was “close to 8 times the company’s financial debts”.

Judge Calama, who is presiding over the investigation, said Zapatero was “the decisive and strategic nucleus of a stable and hierarchical influence-peddling structure” that obtained “economic benefits” after acting as an intermediary “before public bodies in favor of third parties, mainly [the airline] Plus Ultra.” He accuses the former Prime Minister and his network of gaining close to €2 million from the corruption scheme, or trama, as they are known in Spain.

Spaniards are familiar with corruption cases, but the effects of this news were genuinely seismic. Zapatero, who denies the claims being investigated, is closely linked to the current government and routinely campaigns for the party. Indeed, Zapatero’s reputation is so linked to Sánchez that in Congress, the current Prime Minister defended his predecessor to the hilt. He said, “All my support to the judiciary,” but this was immediately followed by, “All my support for Zapatero.”

The Spanish left cried “lawfare” when the news first broke. Investigations by right-wing legal NGOs, chiefly against Sánchez’s wife and brother, have stuttered through low-level tribunals and made it easy for progressives to say this was another case of crying wolf. However, as the afternoon wore on, and it became clear anti-corruption police had been the origin of the investigation, it was soon apparent the canine was really here.

Some evidence was particularly damning. The president of the airline was reported telling an associate that he acquired Zapatero’s services because, “if you want to fuck, sometimes you’ve got to pay a little.” The former Prime Minister’s daughter’s marketing agency also had its offices raided, with investigators alleging it received €700,000 from firms linked to the corruption case.

Gabriel Rufián, Spain’s most popular progressive politician — the spokesperson for the Catalan separatist Left — summarised the situation succinctly. He started his speech in Parliament by simply saying, “I’m screwed.” Although he still lauded Zapatero’s time in government, the allegations were too damaging to ignore. Despite this, he immediately told journalists he would support the government in a vote of no confidence. The fear of a Spanish nationalist, Vox-backed government outweighs any damage to be done from propping up Sánchez.

This seemed to be another “nothing ever happens” moment in Spanish politics, which, although damaging, could be brushed aside in the short term. But then came the Ferraz raid. Early on Wednesday morning, the offices of his party on Madrid’s Calle Ferraz were the subject of a police raid investigating senior figures in the party. The chief allegation under investigation is that party officials were part of a scheme which offered bribes and promotions to law enforcement, witnesses, and prosecutors in return for impeding investigations into Pedro Sánchez and his party.

These Sopranos-level allegations could be even more damaging than the Zapatero case. Prosecutors allege senior members of his party, including its General Secretary Santos Cerdán, held a secret meeting to plot how to “destabilise the judicial investigations into the PSOE and the government.”

What makes this latest drama so important is that it involves the party structure itself. In 2018, Pedro Sánchez came to power because of a no-confidence vote in the conservative Partido Popular (PP) following the huge corruption case known as the “Caso Gürtel”. This involved the “illegal financing” of the PP itself through a network which, when brought down, led to 29 different individuals being convicted. Though the PSOE has had senior figures, including ministers, charged with corruption during the last few years, the party has relied on the excuse that they were lone wolves, and thus the PSOE remained cleaner than the PP it replaced. This latest case blows a hole in that defence.

Sánchez looked unmoved by this latest blow during a press conference he held after meeting the Pope. He said one of those involved, Leire Díaz, had already been expelled from the party following her implication in another corruption case. Otherwise, he said he would not bring forward elections early, as some in his party have demanded. Finally, he continued his defence of Zapatero, again stating his previous defence had not changed.

The two corruption cases of the last fortnight bring a pleasing circularity. It is poetic for the cause of a government’s fall to match the means of its rise. No matter how great the international adulation of Sánchez has been, this looks like the final straw.

The Left will never call for elections the Right is predicted to win, but there is a limit to this strategy. Rufián told the press that they would vote for elections if “illegal financing” was proven in court, but this was an empty ultimatum. 2027’s elections will come far sooner than any judgment.

Spain’s moderate separatists are those who are facing the most pressure. The Basque Nationalist Party and Catalan Junts were already under pressure over immigration, but having to defend such an agonising status quo is incredibly damaging. This being said, no matter how painful it gets, they will never vote for a no-confidence motion alongside the Spanish nationalist Vox. Everything will stay the same, but everything will get worse. It will be a long drag to next summer’s forecast elections.

It was possible to imagine a separatist/progressive last alliance against Vox being in government, but the latest revelations make the PSOE’s unpopularity even harder to ignore. Pedro Sánchez first came to power off the back of a corruption scandal in the Partido Popular. Being embroiled in a similar scandal makes it seem like his government has come to a natural end. As they say in Spain, it seems like we have reached a “fin de ciclo” — an end of cycle.

As the corruption that brought the Left to power now taints its government too, not only the energy but the reason behind progressive power has been exhausted

The model for the Sánchez government has been to ignore, and often incite, conservative Spain at the expense of handouts for Catalan and Basque separatists. However, having almost completely lost what were once PSOE heartlands across Spain, the progressive rump this strategy relied on has been eroded away. While the promise of avoiding Vox in government may have worked in the last election, to use that particularly heavy cliché, Sánchez was defying political gravity.

The birth of the long eight years of Spanish left-wing government was the 15-M populist protests in the thick of the eurozone crisis. The decadence of far-left leaders, infighting, and immigration have gradually destroyed the impetus for this movement. Only Sánchez’s own Machiavellianism and the Catalan question kept the wily PM in power. As the corruption that brought the Left to power now taints its government too, not only the energy but the reason behind progressive power has been exhausted. We’ve arrived at where we started, but everyone is even angrier.