The journalist Luis María Ansón explained it in great detail in 1998: “It was an operation of harassment and demolition. Some of us did it from the honest conviction that it was a service to the democratic system. (…) Through normal critical work, it was not possible to remove González from power.” And he said more when he was asked in an interview if a sector of the press put pressure on the judicial world during those years: “Without a doubt. By reflection or instinct, the media reacted by fueling some situations. That was the case of conflicts and the role of justice. By stoking the fire in that sector, erosion was favored (…). Criticism had to be raised to extremes that sometimes affected the State itself. With the economic boom there would have been no one to throw him out.”
History never repeats itself, but sometimes it rhymes. The Spain of 2024 is not that of the 90s of the last century nor that of the first decade of the 21st century, but it is quite similar. Today we call tension polarization, but it is the same thing. Today in Moncloa there is a left-wing government like then. Today the opposition has raised the level of criticism to unsuspected limits. And today the political, judicial and media right return to the path of ‘anything goes’ or ‘the end justifies the means’ that years later they have versioned even in public.
Between the “to put an end to González, the stability of the State was undermined” that Ansón admitted, the “let Spain fall, we will raise it up” from Montoro, “he who can make it happen” from Aznar and the “our obligation is to throw out Sánchez as soon as possible and we will do it with all the means at our disposal, including the judicial ones” from Tellado this week there are hardly any differences. All paths converge in the same strategy of harassment and demolition with the purpose of installing the framework of structural corruption around Pedro Sánchez.
It’s not the corruption, it’s the framework
In some chronicles of political reporters there appeared this week the explicit recognition of the PP leadership that it matters little or nothing to Feijóo that the National Court archives the complaint filed against the PSOE for illegal financing because by then they will have already established themselves in public opinion. publishes the story of the “bags of money” that supposedly arrived on Ferraz Street. Just like that. Without any scruple, they admit in Genoa that what is important for their interests, beyond the reality of the facts, is to generate a certain environment. Feijóo’s entourage was asked, as appears in several chronicles, about the consequences that the complaint not being admitted could have for the formation, and they responded that this “risk” was “calibrated” before presenting it to the judge and that with The decision had already managed to fit the message into the public opinion of the “money bags” whether it was a lie or truth.
The PP built its complaint with the testimony published by The Objective of an alleged anonymous businessman with a voice distorted by the digital itself to avoid identification who claimed to have taken 90,000 euros in bags to the PSOE headquarters. Information, by the way, that has barely been echoed by the rest of the media in the ideological orbit of the right and that does not appear either in the summary of the Koldo case being investigated by a court in Madrid or in the reports of the Civil Guard. that place former Minister Ábalos at the epicenter of a plot that paid commissions and other compensation in exchange for awards in the Administration.
With that and with the decision of the Supreme Court to prosecute the State Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz, for an alleged crime of revealing secrets, on Génova Street they consider the week written off and believe that Sánchez has already entered injury time . What they are trying to avoid at all costs is for public opinion to know what is behind the high court’s decision and that it is, in addition to a complaint by Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s boyfriend against the prosecutor, a manipulated email and a hoax spread from the Miguel Ángel Rodríguez’s mobile phone. The right hand of the president of the Community of Madrid has been personally involved in the defense of her boss’s partner, a confessed fraudster who made a splash during the pandemic with the sale of masks and, later, committed two crimes of tax fraud and one of document falsification to pay less taxes than he owed.
So, suddenly, the focus returns to where it all began and points again to Ayuso’s partner, who in an intervention unleashed in the Madrid Assembly this Thursday accused Sánchez of being a “mafioso” and a “Stalinist”, a “tyrant” and “nerve”. Nothing like an insult to get around the lack of arguments.
The case opened by the Supreme Court is, for La Moncloa, the exact translation of the famous phrase of the former spokesperson of the PP in the Senate, Ignacio Cosidó, with which he boasted of controlling the Second Chamber of the High Court from behind. “This is exactly what we have seen this week with the opening of the case against the attorney general: control of the Second Chamber from behind,” the Government warns.
Leadership crisis
The inflamed offensive of the PP responds, in the words of Sánchez’s circle, to a crisis of Feijóo’s leadership, “which is known to be questioned internally”, as demonstrated by the statements of several popular leaders who doubt “the effectiveness of a strategy of empty confrontation of content”. Something that, on the other hand, the socialists see as a “parliamentary glue” for the majority that made the investiture possible and “an incentive for the cohesion of the political left.”
However, both the Ábalos case and the Supreme Court’s decision come at a time when the Government is not guaranteed approval of the Budgets, Sumar questions some decisions of the Council of Ministers and Podemos raises the level of criticism against the cabinet. Sanchez. “Nothing that disturbs the tranquility of the president,” warn the socialists, who in passing draw attention to “the imposed social turn that Feijóo announced, his absence of a project beyond the alleged harassment and demolition and his internal weakness in the face of an Ayuso who It sets the pace for him every day.”
Every Wednesday, as soon as Feijóo’s usual face-to-face with Sánchez in the Government control session ends, Ayuso and his chief of staff immediately launch from their social networks the messages that the PP makes their own, including the “pa’lante” that Miguel Ángel Rodríguez (MAR) has coined it to refer to the accusation of Begoña Gómez, the Attorney General, Ábalos and many other names immersed in judicial cases. And this while the press sympathetic to Feijóo highlights the popular leader, much more than his proposals, his “new and youthful image” thanks to two eye surgeries and a new hairstyle. First-hand information, with quotation marks from the popular leadership and even from the hairdresser who attends to the leader of the PP in A Coruña and to whom they attribute the great exclusive of the year, that Feijóo “has given up on vegetable dye.”
The PNV is suspicious of a strategy that seeks only to muddy
Ironies aside, it is not the dye or the obsession with image that today keeps Feijóo from the possibility of reaching the Government. It is the lack of willingness of Sánchez’s still partners to support a motion of censure promoted by the PP, as confirmed by the fact that Jordi Turull this week described as “fantasy” some statements by the president of Junts, Laura Borrás, in that line and which she herself was later forced to qualify.
Nor is the PNV for the work as confirmed by the words of its parliamentary spokesperson, Aitor Esteban, for whom “there are many things that completely distance” his party from the popular ones, who are “very nervous that the 2025 budget could be approved.” ” and Sánchez “can finish the legislature even if it is in fits and starts.”
Esteban, who is usually one of the politicians who speaks most clearly, maintained in an interview with RNE that the PP maintains a “wrong strategy” with which it tries to “muddy up” the public conversation, as demonstrated by its attempt to convert “judicialization” of the Koldo case in an issue of illegal financing of the PSOE that for now is not seen.”
Thus, from the Government, in addition to defending that the Ábalos case is circumscribed and had a forceful response long before the former minister was charged, they declare that they have “absolute tranquility” because “not only has there been no illegal financing” but that At the Ferraz headquarters “there is and has not been any cash” for more than five years. “Neither employees nor leaders even have credit cards. They pay their expenses and, after justifying them, they are paid by bank transfer,” they explain from the Organization secretariat.
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