The fiction that Sánchez didn't know what his trusted men in the PSOE were doing

This afternoon, socialism achieved a new milestone in Spain with the provisional imprisonment of former minister José Luis Ábalos.

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Along with Ábalos, his former advisor Koldo García Izaguirre has also been remanded in custody. According to the Supreme Court, both are being investigated for the possible crimes of membership in a criminal organization, bribery, insider trading, influence peddling, and embezzlement.

A week ago, Spanish socialism achieved the milestone of the first Attorney General of the State convicted and disqualified for a crime, an extremely serious event that is being dealt with by Pedro Sánchez's government with a wave of attacks against the magistrates who handed down that sentence, that is, a wave of attacks against judicial independence. With Ábalos's imprisonment, the socialists achieve a new milestone: he is the first sitting deputy sent to prison in almost half a century of democracy in Spain.

Some will argue that the PSOE expelled Ábalos. It's true: they did so after keeping a disciplinary file open for 16 months, a fact that made it clear that the party was in no hurry to take that measure, probably for fear that Ábalos would start revealing many of the things he knows about the dirty laundry of the PSOE and the government. It was a reasonable fear: just yesterday the former minister confirmed that Sánchez met secretly with ETA member Arnaldo Otegi to negotiate the motion of no confidence that brought him to power in 2018, a meeting revealed by El Español this week and that has been denied by Sánchez and by Otegui.

Ábalos is now the second former Socialist minister to enter prison. The first was former Interior Minister José Barrionuevo in 1998 after being convicted for his involvement in the GAL case, a state terrorism case. At that time, the PSOE leadership accompanied Barrionuevo to the prison entrance, it is unclear whether to show their support or to ensure that he was imprisoned without revealing everything he knew. Today, Ábalos enters prison alone, after his party attempted to create a firewall to protect itself from his scandals.

With the court order issued today, two former PSOE organizing secretaries have now been sent to prison in recent months. The other was Santos Cerdán, who was remanded in custody in July and remained there for five months, being released a few days ago. The PSOE organizing secretaries are people of utmost confidence to the party leader. They are traditionally considered his right-hand men within the organization.

Thus, the idea that Sánchez didn't know what Cerdán and Ábalos were doing is just another fabrication from the socialist factory. These two men, accused of corruption, were trusted confidants of the PSOE's general secretary, and it's not credible that Sánchez was completely unaware of two people who were so close to him. Let's remember that Ábalos was the PSOE's organizational secretary between 2016 and 2021. Cerdán was his successor until 2025. In nine years, Sánchez didn't have even the slightest inkling of what they were doing? It's an absurd notion, and even if it were true, ignorance wouldn't absolve Sánchez of responsibility, since he placed his complete trust in both of them. If he didn't want to know what they were doing, that doesn't absolve him of guilt: on the contrary, it makes him an accomplice for keeping them in their positions for so long.

That is the biggest burden now weighing on Sánchez with regard to these corruption scandals. In fact, one has to wonder if we will end up seeing the current Prime Minister suffer the same fate as Ábalos and Cerdán, because if Sánchez knew what his organizational secretaries were doing, then he must answer for it before the courts.

One has to wonder if his entire campaign to ensure that former Attorney General Álvaro García Ortiz goes unpunished isn't, in reality, an attempt to guarantee that judges won't dare to act against the president, for fear of reprisals. This is where Spanish citizens must take an active response: we must support the justice system so that it can fulfill its duty without fear, no matter who is implicated.

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Photo: PSOE. José Luis Ábalos and Pedro Sánchez during a meeting of the board of trustees of the Pablo Iglesias Foundation on September 21, 2018.