6 hours ago
8
Tens of thousands of people have attended an anti-government demonstration in Madrid to demand a snap general election as the country’s socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, tries to weather a series of corruption allegations involving his family, his party and his administration.
Sunday’s protest, called by Spain’s conservative People’s party (PP) under the slogan, “This is it: mafia or democracy?”, was held three days after one of Sánchez’s closest erstwhile allies, the former transport minister José Luis Ábalos, was remanded in custody by a judge investigating an alleged kickbacks-for-contracts scheme.
The PP put attendance at 80,000, while the central government’s delegate to the region estimated that half that many people had turned out for the rally at the Temple of Debod in the centre of the capital.
The PP’s leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, described the legislature as “absurd” and said it could not be allowed to continue. He added that Ábalos’s detention before trial proved Sánchez’s style of politics – labelled sanchismo – was rotten. “Sanchismo is political, economic, institutional, social and moral corruption,” Feijóo told the crowd. “Sanchismo is in prison and it needs to get out of government.”
Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the populist PP president of the Madrid region – whose boyfriend is to go on trial accused of tax fraud and falsifying documents – went further. In a characteristically fiery speech, she attempted to invoke the spectre of the defunct Basque terrorist group Eta, saying Sánchez had given succour to the Basque nationalists who supported his government.
“Eta is preparing its assault on the Basque Country and on Navarra while it props up Pedro Sánchez,” she said. “Tell me that’s not true. But there’s no bigger moral corruption and no greater betrayal of Spain that that.” Eta abandoned its armed struggle for independence in 2011 and formally dissolved itself seven years ago.
Felix Bolaños, Spain’s minister for the presidency and justice, said the PP and the far-right Vox party – which did not take part in Sunday’s demonstration – were fundamentally the same and were competing to see which could “say the most outrageous things about the prime minister”.
Sánchez, who came to power in 2018 after using a vote of no-confidence to topple the corruption-mired government of one of Feijóo’s predecessors, has vowed to carry on despite the proliferation of graft allegations concerning his circle and a flurry of recent judicial blows.
On Monday, his attorney general, Álvaro García Ortiz, resigned after being found guilty by the supreme court of leaking confidential information about the tax case of Ayuso’s boyfriend.
The conviction of Spain’s top prosecutor has further fuelled the debate over the politicisation of the judiciary and came as investigations continue into allegations of corruption involving Sánchez’s wife and his brother.
While the prime minister has dismissed those claims as politically motivated smears, in June he ordered his right-hand man, Santos Cerdán, to resign as the socialist party’s organisational secretary after a supreme court judge found “firm evidence” of Cerdán’s possible involvement in taking kickbacks on public contracts for sanitary equipment during the Covid pandemic. Ábalos and one of his aides, Koldo García, are also accused of involvement in the illegal enterprise.
Cerdán, Ábalos and García all deny any wrongdoing and insist they are innocent.
