Journalist Luis María Ansón explained it in detail in 1998: “It was an operation of harassment and demolition. Some of us did so with the honest belief that it was a service to the democratic system. (…) Thanks to normal critical work, it was not possible to remove González from power.” And he says more when asked in an interview if a sector of the press put pressure on the legal world during these years: “Without a doubt. By reflection or by instinct, the media reacted by fueling certain situations. This is the case of conflicts and the role of justice. By stoking the fire in this area, erosion was encouraged (…). The criticism had to be taken to the extreme, sometimes affecting the State itself. With the economic boom, there would have been no one to kick him out.”
History never repeats itself, but sometimes it rhymes. The Spain of 2024 is not that of the 90s of the last century nor that of the first decade of the 21st century, but it is quite similar. Today it’s called voltage bias, but it’s the same thing. Today, in Moncloa, there is a left-wing government like then. Today, the opposition has raised the level of criticism to unsuspected limits. And today, the political, judicial and media right is returning to the path of “anything goes” or “the end justifies the means”, which it declined years later even in public.
Between the “to put an end to González, the stability of the State has been compromised” as recognized by Ansón, the “let Spain fall, we will raise it” of Montoro, “the one who can achieve it” of Aznar and Tellado’s “our obligation is to expel Sánchez as quickly as possible and we will do it with all the means at our disposal, including judicial” this week, there are practically no differences. All paths converge towards the same strategy of harassment and demolition with the aim of installing the framework of structural corruption around Pedro Sánchez.
It’s not corruption, it’s the framework
In some columns of political journalists this week there appeared the explicit recognition of the leadership of the PP that it matters little or nothing to Feijóo that the National Court files the complaint filed against the PSOE for illegal financing, because at that moment they will already be publicly established. Opinion publishes the story of the “bags of money” which arrived in rue Ferraz. Like that. Without any scruple, they admit in Genoa that what is important for their interests, beyond the reality of the facts, is to generate a certain environment. Feijóo’s entourage was questioned, as appears in several chronicles, about the consequences that the unadmitted complaint could have on the training, and they responded that this “risk” had been “calibrated” before presenting it to the judge and that with the decision had already succeeded in getting the message into public opinion about the “bags of money”, whether it was a lie or a truth.
The PP built its complaint with the testimony published by The Objective of an alleged anonymous businessman with a voice distorted by digital technology itself to avoid being identified and who claimed to have taken 90,000 euros in bags to the PSOE headquarters. Information that is barely taken up by the rest of the media in the ideological orbit of the right and which appears neither in the summary of the Koldo affair investigated by the Madrid court, nor in the reports of the Civil Guard which places former Minister Ábalos at the epicenter of a conspiracy that paid commissions and other compensation in exchange for rewards in the administration.
With this and with the decision of the Supreme Court to prosecute the Attorney General of the State, Álvaro García Ortiz, for an alleged crime of revealing secrets, in Génova Street, they consider the week as expunged and believe that Sánchez is already entered added time. What they are trying to avoid at all costs is that public opinion knows what is hidden behind the decision of the higher court and that it is, in addition to a complaint filed by the friend of Isabel Díaz Ayuso against the prosecutor, of a manipulated email and a hoax broadcast from the cell phone of Miguel Ángel Rodríguez. The right-hand man of the president of the Community of Madrid was personally involved in the defense of his boss’s partner, a confessed fraudster who caused a sensation during the pandemic with the sale of masks and subsequently committed two crimes of tax evasion and one of falsifying documents to pay less taxes than he owed.
So, suddenly, attention returns to where it all began and points again to Ayuso’s partner, who, in an intervention triggered this Thursday in the Madrid Assembly, accused Sánchez of being a “mafioso ” and a “Stalinist”, a “tyrant” and “nervous”. Nothing like an insult to get around the lack of arguments.
The trial opened by the Supreme Court is, for La Moncloa, the exact translation of the famous phrase of the former spokesperson of the PP in the Senate, Ignacio Cosidó, with which he boasted of controlling the Second Chamber of the Upper House from behind Court. “This is exactly what we saw this week with the opening of the trial against the Attorney General: control of the Second Chamber from behind,” warns the government.
Leadership crisis
The PP’s fiery offensive responds, in the words of Sánchez’s entourage, to a crisis in Feijóo’s leadership, “which is known to be questioned internally”, as demonstrated by the declarations of several leaders popular who doubt “the effectiveness of a strategy of confrontation empty of content”. Something that, on the other hand, the socialists consider as a “parliamentary cement” for the majority which made possible the investiture and “a stimulating for the cohesion of the political left.”
However, both the Ábalos case and the Supreme Court decision come at a time when the government does not have the guarantee of approving budgets, Sumar questions certain decisions of the Council of Ministers and Podemos raises the level of criticism against the government. “Nothing that disturbs the tranquility of the president”, warn the socialists, who in passing draw attention to “the imposed social turn announced by Feijóo, his absence of project beyond the alleged harassment and demolition and his internal weakness in the face of an Ayuso who gives him the rhythm every day.
Every Wednesday, as soon as Feijóo’s usual face-to-face with Sánchez ends during the government control session, Ayuso and his chief of staff immediately launch from their social networks the messages that the PP appropriates, including the “pa’lante”. that Miguel Ángel Rodríguez (MAR) invented it to refer to the accusation of Begoña Gómez, Attorney General of Ábalos and many other names immersed in legal cases. And this, while the press favorable to Feijóo highlights the popular leader, much more than his proposals, his “new and young image” thanks to two eye operations and a new hairstyle. First-hand information, in quotes from the popular leadership and even from the hairdresser who takes care of the leader of the PP in La Coruña and who is credited with the great exclusivity of the year, that Feijóo “has given up on dyeing vegetable.
The PNV is wary of a strategy that only seeks to confuse
Ironies aside, it is not dyeing or obsession with image that is preventing Feijóo from the possibility of accessing government today. It is the lack of will of Sánchez’s partners to support a motion of censure promoted by the PP, as confirmed by the fact that Jordi Turull described this week as “fantastic” certain statements by the president of Junts, Laura Borrás, in this sense. and which she herself was subsequently forced to qualify.
The PNV is not for work either, as confirmed by the words of its parliamentary spokesperson, Aitor Esteban, for whom “there are many things that completely distance” his party from the popular parties, which are “very nervous to the idea that the 2025 budget can be approved.” ” and Sánchez “can finish the legislature even if it is in fits and starts”.
Esteban, who is usually one of the politicians who express himself most clearly, affirmed in an interview with RNE that the PP maintains a “bad strategy” with which it tries to “confuse” the public debate, as demonstrated his attempt at conversion. “judicialization” of the Koldo affair in a question of illegal financing of the PSOE which for the moment is not seen.
Thus, from the government’s side, in addition to defending that the case of Ábalos is circumscribed and received a forceful response long before the former minister was indicted, it declares that it enjoys “absolute tranquility” because “not only has there been no illegal financing”, but that at Ferraz’s headquarters “there is and has not been liquidity” for more than five years. “Neither the employees nor the managers even have a credit card. They pay their expenses and, after having justified them, they are paid by bank transfer,” they explain from the Secretariat of the Organization.
