MadridIn recent days there has been a lot of talk about the former socialist minister José Luis Ábalos and the state attorney general, Álvaro García Ortiz, protagonists of environmental noise and a political and judicial battle that most of society knows only broadly speaking It is a fierce struggle, which once again has moved the stage of the struggle for power to the courts and justice. The PP has launched into this fight as if it were the final stretch of a legislature or a presidential term. But it is neither one thing nor the other.
The government and the PSOE, for their part, have resorted to a defense tactic that does not usually work. To say that the socialists do not accept lessons from anyone in the fight against corruption, and even less from those who dedicated themselves to destroying with hammer blows the computers of the ex-treasurer of the PP Luis Bárcenas, is tantamount to taking refuge in a cliché and spent, because the faults of others never justify one’s own mistakes. The advantage with which the popular people play derives from the fact that they have been able to make a package of everything, to the point of identifying the president of the government, Pedro Sánchez, with a kind of Vito Corleone who directs the entire machinery of the corruption from his office in Moncloa. It is absurd, but sometimes he who is able to generate associations of simple ideas has a lot of ground gained for his purposes. The world of advertising is full of examples of this mechanism of individual and collective psychology.
The plot of the masks
Given how the investigation has evolved into the activities of the plot, which took advantage of the need for masks during the pandemic, and the benefits that ex-minister Ábalos and his lover would have derived from this network, we could come to believe that the reports of the Central Operative Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard move mountains. But they are not always interpreted with the same predisposition. Those who emphasized the importance of the report of the same specialized unit when it practically exonerated the wife of the president of the Spanish government, Begoña Gómez, have now not given similar credibility to the testimony that explains the ease with which the aforementioned group penetrated the administration and moved comfortably placing their products and celebrating everything around a good table and some seafood.
But I also draw attention to the fact that a police report, especially when it makes simple circumstantial claims, has limited probative value. I say this because no one will be surprised if the main cases investigated – or even accused – in these episodes that are now the focus of the political debate do not result in criminal convictions, or take a long time to do so. It is very clear that in the case of corruption the emphasis must be placed on prevention and control mechanisms to avoid it. When the Civil Guard has to deal with it, we are already late. And sometimes the sentences are handed down a long time after the fact, as has happened now with the ten years in prison that has fallen to Eduardo Zaplana (PP) for corruption. Someone should write a PhD thesis on the backlash of politically motivated investigations and their ending up in court. Sometimes it would be said that the judges have been infected by the climate of polarization, seeing to what extent passages of judicial resolutions can come to seem like fragments of political speeches.
reminiscences
The Superior Court of Justice of Madrid has rejected the complaint of Pedro Sánchez against judge Juan Carlos Peinado, instructor of the proceedings against the president’s wife, Begoña Gómez, arguing among other things that “even if it is not relevant, the lawyer of the State is right when it remembers the influence that some judicial decisions can have on the political future of a country”. “There are examples not so far back in time…”. The resolution does not identify the case. A friend told me that this passage made him think of the PP’s criticism of the judgment that condemned this party as a participant for profit in the Gürtel case, a resolution that was used in the motion of no confidence against Rajoy.
The same text of the Madrid court also says that “conceiving as an unnecessary attack on the actions of the government the subpoena of its president as a witness in a criminal case does not have the most elementary justification”, and adds that “it is not the the first time this has happened in our democratic history”, without identifying here either which episode this mention refers to. It is possible that it was an allusion to the subpoena of Felipe González to testify at the Supreme Court in 1998 as a witness about the kidnapping of Segundo Marey, one of the most notorious episodes of the State’s dirty war against ETA terrorism. Adolfo Suárez also testified as a witness, in 1995, about the Banesto case at the National Court, where he denied having received 300 million pesetas for his party, the CDS, in exchange for favoring this entity. And Mariano Rajoy testified about the Gürtel corruption case, also in this court, as a witness, in 2017. The reader will be able to compare the importance and repercussions of the respective episodes, as well as the knowledge that the mentioned presidents could have of the facts .
The legislature will follow
As for today, the legislature will continue, there is no prospect of a no-confidence motion, nor is Pedro Sánchez tempted to leave Moncloa. It is true that socialists drag their feet these days, and walk with their eyes on the ground. The Koldo case, which after the recent report of the Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office is now the Ábalos case, has allowed the popular leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, to make a qualitative leap in his campaign against the sanchismplacing the figure of Pedro Sánchez at the head of a corruption network that would affect the entire administration.
If we were in the vicinity of a new electoral confrontation, it would be predictable that the PP would exaggerate as much as possible, in order to heat up the atmosphere and get the number of supporters of the alternation in power to grow. But the absence of this factor, of the arrangement of a propitious calendar, makes Feijóo’s words in the interior and exterior scenes – every time he travels through Europe – sound particularly exaggerated, confusing his wishes with reality.
