Mister Bean's steak tartare and the 'bad luck' of Socialist Pedro Sánchez

Yesterday I remembered an episode of one of the television series that has made me laugh more times than I've seen.

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I'm referring to the series "Mr. Bean," starring Rowan Atkinson. Its second episode aired on November 5, 1990, on the British channel ITV. In the second act, Mr. Bean goes to a restaurant to celebrate his birthday alone. Due to lack of money, he orders steak tartare, a raw meat recipe popularized by Jules Verne in his novel "Michael Strogoff" (1875). In case anyone hasn't seen it, this is the specific moment I remembered yesterday:

Mr. Bean is disgusted by the taste of the steak and tries various ways to get rid of it, hiding the pieces because he is unable to tell the waiters that he didn't like the dish. Finally, Mr. Bean uses the accidental fall of a waiter as his final trick, blaming the mishap for the pieces of meat appearing where he had hidden them.

Yesterday, during Pedro Sánchez's press conference with a contrite appearance, the Spanish people saw something very similar to that scene from Mr. Bean: pure theater, a farce in which the president of the Spanish government and secretary general of the Socialist Party (PSOE) pretended to be ignorant of what a person he trusted the most was doing, a person he appointed to the position of secretary of the PSOE's organization and whom he supported when its scandals began to come to light.

Surrounded by corruption cases, Sánchez has opted for the pathetic strategy of feigning ignorance, as if he were unaware of what someone very close to him in his party was doing, because he knows the alternative is worse: being singled out as an accomplice to their alleged crimes. After attacking the judges and the media that are investigating this socialist corruption, the leader of the PSOE wants us to believe that all this has taken him by surprise.

According to that version, Sánchez would not be corrupt, but a man with very bad luck, judging by the review of those scandals that I made here yesterday. Let us remember, in fact, that currently, in the entourage of the president of the government, Sánchez's wife, brother, attorney general and a former minister (who was also secretary of organization of the PSOE, like Santos Cerdán) are accused of various corruption offenses. It is already bad luck that Sánchez associates with people of that profile but never finds out anything about what happened.

We have to wonder what firewall Sánchez will create next to prevent the corruption in his circle from spilling onto him, because that is precisely what we saw yesterday with the pitiful display put on by the Socialist leader. Will he say he knew nothing about what his wife, his brother, his Attorney General, and his former Minister of Transport were doing? Will he try to convince us that the steak tartare of Socialist corruption is appearing everywhere as if by magic, to the surprise of Sánchez himself? What Sánchez is doing is taking 48 million Spaniards for idiots.

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Photo: PSOE. Pedro Sánchez and Santos Cerdán in a photo from a PSOE leadership meeting held on April 10, 2023.