Sánchez goes on the offensive but is far from resolving the crisis.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez applied a maxim this Monday that is part of his resilience manual: the best defense is a good attackUnlike last Thursday, when Sánchez appeared in black and very affected, this Monday he tried to boost the morale of the socialist troops by making a staunch defense of the cleanliness of the organization and also of the work of his government. Where he has seemed least uncomfortable is in the attack on the right and the extreme right, the PP and Vox, which in his opinion are much worse than the PSOE in matters of corruption. The leader of the PSOE has also challenged Alberto Núñez Feijóo to present a motion of censure, thus shifting the pressure to the PP, which has Vox on its right accusing it of not having the courage to take this step.
The five hours of meeting of the PSOE executive They have thus served as an attempt to turn the page and go on the offensive with the usual argument, namely, that a PP and Vox government will always be worse. However, Sánchez and the PSOE as a whole are far from having offered a convincing explanation for the involvement of their last two organizational secretaries in a major commission-taking scandal. How can we explain that Sánchez continued to trust Santos Cerdán when the case broke if everyone knew he was the one who had brought Koldo García to Madrid and placed him as José Luis Ábalos's driver? Why did no alarm bells go off and no one suspect anything? Not even when the file for Ábalos's expulsion was forgotten in a drawer until that very Monday? If we are to accept Sánchez's version—that he has been consecutively betrayed by Ábalos and Cerdán, and that the corruption scandal is limited to the three protagonists—it is clear that internal controls have failed miserably. The resolution of the crisis is still far off.
In this regard, it is worth highlighting the commitment to hold a commission of inquiry into the case in Congress. It would be beneficial, in addition to clarifying all responsibilities, to also understand the scope of the phenomenon across all public works and to introduce any necessary legislative changes. It cannot be that in the middle of 2025, citizens cannot trust in the fairness of public tenders and the awarding of works. And here, too, the construction companies should be under scrutiny.
The attitude of the leader of the opposition, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, deserves a separate chapter. It is incomprehensible that this Monday he declined to appear in order to respond to Sánchez and instead delegated it to spokesperson Borja Sémper, who has already made it clear that there will be no motion of censure. Feijóo did not want to respond personally to Sánchez because he knows that there is a portion of his electorate that does not understand why he did not present the motion. Feijóo seems determined to reach the Moncloa presidency by following the principle of least resistance, but along the way, he's also losing any credibility. And Sánchez is right about one thing: the People's Party (PP) can't lecture anyone on this matter.