Feijóo's strategy to distance himself from the trial of the state's sewers

MadridThe day before the trial of the Kitchen case began at the National Court, the PP announced that its strategy was to create a firewall. "Feijóo is not the Kitchen," party sources proclaimed. This has been the popular party's approach throughout the first and second days of the oral hearing. The argument that current PP leaders repeat both in public and in private is that it is a matter related to the past, which has absolutely nothing to do with Alberto Núñez Feijóo and the current popular president's team. The person in charge of verbalizing this on Tuesday was Alicia García, spokesperson in the Senate, in a press conference focused on attacking Pedro Sánchez for the alleged corruption surrounding him. "We are talking about a case from more than ten or fifteen years ago, but today a case from fifteen minutes ago from the PSOE is being judged. And those that remain," she defended.

The start of the trial in the Supreme Court against José Luis Ábalos, former number three of Sánchez in the PSOE and former Minister of Transport, the day after the Kitchen case began, has been the perfect coincidence for the PP to point to this discourse. The popular party maintains that its party already paid the political consequences of cases like Kitchen or Gürtel with the 2018 motion of no confidence that brought down Mariano Rajoy's government, while the PSOE has not yet paid the price for the scandals of Ábalos or Santos Cerdán, the successor of the former Minister of Transport in the socialist organization secretariat and until less than a year ago the right-hand man of the Spanish president. The popular spokesperson in the Senate reproached that precisely "those who came giving lessons on corruption, have ended up starring in it and are up to their necks in mud."

And the truth is that in the Kitchen trial, which judges the leadership of the Ministry of the Interior with Rajoy, no member of Feijóo's era is on the defendant's bench. The leader of the PP claims that his general secretaries have "irreproachable" track records and that no counselor from his time as president of Galicia is under investigation for corruption. "We are not the same," they say in Génova to differentiate themselves from Sánchez, even though other parties, such as Vox, take advantage of the trials of former officials from both sides to put them in the same bag. The Senate is precisely where the PP seeks to focus on cases related to Sánchez and divert attention from those that compromise figures who have been key in his party, such as Rajoy –called as a witness in the trial– or Jorge Fernández Díaz –main defendant and suspended from membership since July 2021, but still with an open file–.

Among the moves that respond to this objective announced by García in the upper house is a new attempt to summon Cerdán's wife, Francisca Muñoz, next Thursday in one of the investigation commissions focused on Sánchez's circle –after she stood them up last Monday, citing medical reasons–. Furthermore, in this Tuesday afternoon's control session in the Senate, in which Carlos Cuerpo has debuted as first vice-president, one of the topics has been precisely Ábalos and what the PP has called "the black spring of sanchismo" –the socialist leader's brother will also be tried before the summer–. Cuerpo has avoided controversy in line with Moncloa's stance, which distances itself from the situation of the former Minister of Transport.

The judge dismisses judging the PP

In the second session of the trial of the Kitchen case, the court judging the ten defendants for the Interior's dirty war has given Feijóo's PP a little more breathing room by having ruled out seating the party on the accused's bench as a beneficiary. The PSOE, which is acting as the popular prosecution, had requested to suspend the trial and return to the preliminary investigation phase to be able to indict both the PP as a legal entity and the former general secretary María Dolores de Cospedal. The president of the court, Teresa Palacios, argued that the trial of events dating back to 2013 cannot be delayed any further. "It was about time," she stressed, thus endorsing the investigation by the controversial judge Manuel García-Castellón, now retired.