Wallowing in the mud
Within the thick fog of this electoral pre-campaign, a kind of subplot has been brewing and growing around Koldo García —one of those picturesque criminals produced by the circuits of political corruption— and the Popular Party. As everyone already knows, this Koldo claims that he received a proposal to be freed from prison, and to take a bonus of one million euros, in exchange for making statements incriminating the PSOE, Pedro Sánchez, and his family in corrupt activities, whether real or invented. Since Koldo is a convicted and imprisoned criminal, his word is not considered worthy of credit (although it was, at least for the Spanish right, when he made statements that suited their interests better).
The problem is that the PP doesn't have any credibility either when it comes to corruption matters, and on this occasion it has not behaved any differently than we are accustomed to. On one hand, spokesperson Ester Muñoz has vehemently denied that a meeting with Koldo García ever existed. On the other, the PP's Deputy Secretary of Institutional Regeneration (a very fitting title), who was also the party's spokesperson, Cuca Gamarra, acknowledges that a meeting between Koldo García and the lawyer Alberto Durán did indeed take place, although “a million euros was never offered in the name of the PP,” a phrase of well-calculated ambiguity. What does exist are two invoices from the publisher of Eduardo Inda's digital dump, Ok Diario, which paid 240,000 to the lawyer who handled Koldo García's defense (in the invoice descriptions he is mentioned as “señor Koldo García”), precisely on the same days that Ábalos' former collaborator was giving a series of interviews to Ok Diario which bore the inspired title of La manta de Koldo. The pseudo-journalist Inda has also said that the invoices are forged and that he will sue anyone who says otherwise. We already know what the credibility of Inda, the digital outlet, and the ultra-Madrid press is like. The epitome of this whole story, as is also well known, was Víctor de Aldama, another self-confessed criminal who, after being released in exchange for testifying as requested, stated that “collaborating [with justice] pays off” and encouraged “those coming after” to do the same, referring precisely to Koldo and company.
Beyond another inspired phrase, in this case from Pedro Sánchez, “the mud machine” of the Spanish right and far-right exists and everything indicates that it has spent the last three years producing mud and silt wholesale, without sparing energy or money expenses, with the sole objective of bringing down the government and “recovering” for themselves a power they consider belongs to them and which had been stolen from them. That is why Feijóo's promises to lead “an honest government, a government of regeneration” provoke the kind of humor where the smile freezes into a rictus. Feijóo's PP is the same as always, and if they return to government, and even more so hand in hand with Vox, no one will be able to be surprised by what may come to pass.
