The hyperventilated Spanish political climate was only missing the return of the black cloud of corruption. And this Wednesday he returned with all his viscous load to permeate the Congressional chamber during the weekly Government control session. The PP, with its leader at the head and a disciplined army of artillerymen behind, busily dedicated itself to disseminating the Koldo case throughout the Executive and to implicate the president himself in the alleged collection of commissions for the purchase of masks during the worst of the pandemic. The reaction of Pedro Sánchez and his ministers was to replicate the long history of past scandals of the first opposition party. The result: a quagmire in which everyone splashed for an hour and a half.
Francina Armengol, president of Congress, gave the floor to Alberto Núñez Feijóo to open the session and the leader of the PP threw himself into an open grave. “Bluntly,” were his first two words, a warning that preluded the serious accusation that he immediately launched, looking towards the presidential seat: “You knew it and you covered it up.” Thus, without nuances, speaking “on behalf of an entire country” and based only on his word. “Aware from the information we have,” he added, “that you knew about it for at least more than three years.” Both Feijóo and the deputies who later repeated the accusation were exempt from offering any other type of evidence. And since Sánchez chose to ignore it, the PP leader felt confirmed: “It is clear that he knew it.” Or “he who remains silent grants”, which his most faithful pawn, the group’s spokesperson, Miguel Tellado, would later say.
With all these ingredients, Feijóo went one step further, alluding to the proximity to the PSOE leadership of Koldo García, the advisor of former minister José Luis Ábalos detained for alleged collection of commissions, to complete his story and maintain that corruption has accompanied the entire Sánchez’s recent career. According to the PP leader, this corruption “arose in the head of the PSOE”, was installed “in the heart of the Government” and constituted the “birth certificate of his political career”. In his final intervention, Feijóo ran out of time and, with the microphone turned off, he was heard demanding the resignation of half the Executive.
Sánchez grimaced in his seat and when he stood up to respond, he did not mince his words either: “It makes you blush that you think you can take political advantage of corruption.” In his two replies, the president dedicated himself to boasting that he has been “relentless” in “fighting corruption” without hiding behind the “empty speeches” that he attributed to the PP. Although it was implicit in his words, he avoided citing the march to the Mixed Group of former Minister Ábalos and preferred to offer as proof of his commitment the announcement of an investigative commission in Congress on the mask contracts.
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The socialist leader cited everything from “the hammer blows” to destroy the hard drives of former PP treasurer Luis Bárcenas, to the actions of the so-called “patriotic police” to cover up the illegal financing scandal. He clung above all to the way in which Feijóo came to the leadership of his party, after the defenestration of Pablo Casado for accusing the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, of favoring his brother to also charge a commission for the sale. of masks in the pandemic. “I came to fight corruption, you to cover it up. Why did Mr. Casado fall? “He remarked. Later, during a question about housing from the leader of Podemos, Ione Belarra, the president must have remembered a phrase that he had left in the pipeline and recovered it: “I cut corners, others cut off the heads of those who denounce the corruption”.
The mud was incessant until the end of the control session. He Koldo case It not only occupied the battery of questions that the PP had asked the ministers of Justice, Interior, Transport and Territorial Policy. The issue arose in almost each of the opposition’s interventions, whether it was about equality in sports or the management of the Sociological Research Center (CIS). Speaking about this last issue, the popular Manuel Cobo finished with the morning’s joke: “You occupy all the institutions, you leave scorched earth and not even the res-coldos”.
In Tellado’s duel with the Minister of the Presidency and Justice, Félix Bolaños, something that had already been sensed in Feijóo’s interventions became clear: that Ábalos has gone from villain to object of the PP’s desire in 24 hours. The Popular Group spokesperson even promoted an interview that the former minister was offering at that same time on Onda Cero. Tellado further elevated Feijóo’s claims that Sánchez knew everything from the beginning and concluded: “The Government is surrounded by political, moral and economic corruption.”
Bolaños persisted in Sánchez’s line of argument. He considered it “surprising” that a party that has “hundreds of cases” has become a whistleblower of corruption, compared the reaction of the PSOE these days with that shown by the popular party at the time in the face of their own scandals and ended up repeating: “It disgusts me.” the corruption”.
Bolaños responded with such energy that, at the end of each intervention, he abruptly hit the microphone to fold it. Until the popular Manuel Cobo pointed it out to him and since then he took more care. In the middle he still had to face the Vox spokesperson, Pepa Millán, who drew the same conclusions as the PP, with even thicker accusations and the same calmness to avoid presenting any evidence. While the Spaniards were locked in their homes, the socialists “made cash and filled their pockets,” according to Millán. Because this, she continued, is the “PSOE case”, a party that has always been dedicated to “getting rich by stealing from the Spanish.”
In the midst of the brawl, the current Minister of Transport, the always brave Óscar Puente, could not be missing. The PP argued that Sánchez could not ignore what an advisor like Koldo García was doing, and Puente considered that such an accusation becomes like a “boomerang” against the popular ones. And to illustrate this he cited the scandals that the PP leadership always denied knowing about, until ending, of course, in the young Feijóo who, as he continues to say to this day, was unaware that his friend of years was a smuggling kingpin in Galicia.
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