It seems like a lot more, but the Government has just completed three months. Just a month ago, despite the difficulties and pressure from the opposition, the Executive hoped to put the amnesty law on track and with it the Budgets and the legislature. But since Junts decided to vote against the law, on January 30, things have become more complicated. And the setback of the Galician elections, which has revitalized doubts about the territorial weakness of the left, has been followed by the hole of the Koldo case, the first relevant corruption scandal since Sánchez arrived at La Moncloa in 2018. The challenge of José Luis Ábalos, who has decided to entrench himself in his seat and go to the Mixed Group, assuming that the PSOE expels him, in order not to lose the record, thus comes at a particularly delicate moment.
The end of this political drama within the PSOE and the hard core of those who accompanied Sánchez in his 2017 primary adventure, in which Ábalos always had a prominent role, has left the socialist leaders devastated. Many of them expressed in public and private their confusion at the attitude of the former organization secretary, who has chosen to challenge the party in which he has been active almost all his life – after a brief jump in the PCE – and move to the Mixed Group. and thus assume his expulsion in order to continue in Congress with the salary of a deputy and the protection of the capacity against possible future investigations. “This matter causes us a lot of pain,” summarized Patxi López, the spokesperson. “This is not consistent with the trajectory of Ábalos, who has been an exemplary socialist. Going to the Mixed Group is not a decision at your level,” concluded Óscar Puente, Minister of Transportation, the department occupied by the former secretary of organization.
Ábalos insists that he is not leaving because that would imply assuming his guilt: “I cannot end my career as a corrupt person when I am innocent.” But Puente gave the example of Josep Borrell, who abandoned the leadership of the PSOE in 1999 due to the scandal that two of his collaborators had defrauded money from the Treasury, the ministry he directed. No one ever accused Borrell of being corrupt for that, Puente explained, he simply assumed political responsibility for what his subordinates did. It is the same thing that they asked of Ábalos for giving a lot of power in his ministry to Koldo García, detained for allegedly collecting illegal commissions on mask purchase contracts during a pandemic. It was Cristina Narbona herself, president of the PSOE and Borrell’s partner, who brought up that example this Monday in the Executive in which it was decided to ask Ábalos for the minutes.
But the former minister did not pay attention to these arguments and decided to challenge the party and the leader and register his move to the Mixed Group, where he will share space with the Podemos deputies and another former minister, Ione Belarra. Ábalos insists that he is not staying for economic reasons, but rather political ones, to defend his name, but in the PSOE the idea has been established that money and capacity are the two main reasons for assuming nothing less than expulsion from the party for move to the Mixed Group, something that he harshly condemned when he was organization secretary.
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In fact, Ábalos also assumed the discipline at a decisive moment, in 2016, when the manager who led the PSOE after dismissing Pedro Sánchez ordered her deputies to abstain from the investiture of Mariano Rajoy. Sánchez left the seat so as not to have to obey that order, Ábalos kept it and abstained out of discipline, although he continued to support the current president of the Government and went with him in the 2017 primaries.
The crisis is very important, especially from a symbolic point of view: a former Secretary of Organization of the PSOE moves to the Mixed Group, an image that seemed impossible, and he does so after a corruption scandal that affects one of his main collaborators . And it also comes at a particularly sensitive moment, when the PP, euphoric after the success in Galicia, pushes hard, convinced that Sánchez’s Government is on the path to political collapse. However, various sources from both the Government and the PSOE point out that this crisis, which no one minimizes, will not have relevant consequences for the Executive if Ábalos continues voting with the PSOE, something they take for granted. The former minister himself, consulted this Tuesday in the halls of Congress while he was on his way to register to switch to the Mixed, assured that he will continue to support the Government. None of those who know him in the PSOE see him capable of doing anything different. There is no apparent concern there.
Sánchez will now try to regain the initiative from this Wednesday, the day in which he faces a very difficult control session, which will focus on the Koldo case. The president, according to government sources, is preparing a counteroffensive in which he will compare the response to the corruption cases of the PSOE and the PP to try to stop the attacks of Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who is experiencing a sweet moment after the success of the PP in Galicia. and the unexpected gift of the Koldo case. Sánchez needed to resolve the crisis with Ábalos before this Wednesday, precisely to be able to give a forceful response to Feijóo. But he was hoping for another way out, and now he will find his former organizational secretary already in the Mixed.
Once the bad situation of this Wednesday has been overcome, in which Sánchez will claim that he is willing to act “no matter who falls” and no matter how difficult the decision may be, his team is now working to accelerate with the two major pending issues, the law of amnesty and the Budgets, which are chained, and thus be able to definitively get the legislature back on track to dispel the idea that it is at risk.
“In four years there will be many cycle changes,” Sánchez joked last week in Morocco, after telling journalists that he has “all the time in the world” ahead of him to manage and resolve any crisis, because the legislature has just begin. At that time, the dimensions of the Koldo case, which had just become known, were not yet seen, much less could Sánchez imagine that he would end up with a former organizational secretary in the Mixed Group six days later. The Government clings to that idea, the time ahead and the majority that has not been broken, to trust that it will be able to continue and overcome this crisis as well.
Everything happens at breakneck speed in the crazy script of Spanish politics since the era of calm majorities in Congress was dynamited in 2015. But Sánchez has shown in the past that he is the one who moves best in this maelstrom. Ábalos’s challenge has made it clear that the president does not always achieve his goal even within the PSOE, because he has not managed to convince what was a prominent member of the hard core to make a sacrifice for the good of the party. But Sánchez has already shown on many previous occasions that in the most complicated moments he pulls out a card that changes the play. Now it is his turn to prove that he can get the inauguration back on track no matter what happens.
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