“Nervous” in his first press conference at the headquarters of the Andalusian PSOE in 14 years, Manuel Chaves has returned this Thursday, now without a position, to exercise the leadership he has had since he was first elected President of the Junta in 1990. “The ruling of the Constitutional Court represents a turning point in Andalusian politics: it marks the beginning of the end of the PP government cycle in Andalusia,” Chaves predicted in a room packed with journalists and attended in the front row by the Secretary General of the Andalusian PSOE, Juan Espadas.
The former president appeared after the court of guarantees annulled the sentence of the ER caseAnd issued in 2019 by the Provincial Court of Seville and ratified in 2022 by the Supreme Court, and has granted full or partial protection to ten of the 12 convicted former senior socialist officials who appealed. Five of them – such as former councillors Carmen Martínez Aguayo or Francisco Vallejo – have spent a year and a half in prison, until they were released by the recent resolutions of the Constitutional Court. Chaves was sentenced only to disqualification for a crime of prevarication, but the guarantee body also granted him partial protection and declared his fundamental rights violated. The Seville Court will now have to issue a new ruling, recalculating the sentence downwards.
Chaves spoke today on behalf of all those convicted and now exonerated, using the word “we” continuously. The former president of the Junta for 19 years (1990-2009), general secretary of the Andalusian PSOE for 14 (1994-20210) and federal president of the PSOE for 12 (2000-2012) has, in a certain sense, with his words, marked the course that, in his opinion, the PSOE of Andalusia should follow: “Now we can clean up the mud that they threw at us,” he said.
Chaves has blamed the Popular Party for having tried to “erase 30 years of socialist management” by launching the ERE casea “political and media operation with judicial guise mounted by the PP” that “threw dirt on the political adversary’s machinery”. The former Andalusian president has stressed that this case “influenced” the results of the 2018 Andalusian elections, which gave rise for the first time to a popular government. “The PP had the worst result in its history, but it came to power with the votes of many Andalusians and with a pact between Ciudadanos and Vox,” the former socialist leader has said. “We are not going to question the legitimacy of a government that came to power with the votes of the majority,” he has emphasized, “[pero] There was a clear relationship between the ERE and the election results.”
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The former president, who voluntarily left his party in 2016 after being prosecuted, wants to have his party membership card again. “I have never left politics. I am a politician by vocation, I have followed it day by day. I have always felt like a socialist, with or without a membership card. I want to return to the PSOE, to do what the PSOE wants. I put myself at its disposal. I want to work for the party in whatever Juan wants.” [Espadas] and the leadership of the PSOE in Andalusia,” he said.
Chaves admitted that he feels “very sad” because “what has happened should not have happened.” “I have just turned 79 and I could have done many things. There have been many political careers cut short, and professionally there are people who have lost their jobs. And the worst of all is that we have been attacked with false accusations, of corruption and theft,” he said. He also said that yesterday the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, called him to congratulate him on the sentence. And he stressed, in response to a journalist’s questions: “I have always felt the warmth of my colleagues. I have always felt protected by the PSOE.”
![Manuel Chaves, during his press conference this Thursday at the PSOE headquarters in Seville.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/GCPSAKIM2NFFJGGXPIF3IIIW5E.jpg?auth=5c79f7c2c017225fa07a7db9f653d1f2ce223df7a14dd1171d9ca44154e1f27d&width=414)
The former socialist general secretary did not want to describe it as lawfare [persecución judicial al adversario político] the ERE process, although he has pointed out that “there was political interference that conditioned the instruction.” “The beginning [del caso] It was a prospective legal action, a general case was opened,” he insisted. In his opinion, the investigating judge, Mercedes Alaya, the Provincial Court of Seville and the Supreme Court “did not see or did not want to see that a law [de Presupuestos] “It cannot be illegal.”
Chaves has asked the PP leaders to “respect” the Constitutional Court’s ruling and has urged them to abandon “the strategy of delegitimising the institutions”. At the press conference, in which he answered nine questions, the former Andalusian president has avoided subscribing to the words of his successor at the head of the Junta and the party, José Antonio Griñán, who in 2015 denied that the top brass of the Andalusian Government had hatched the ERE plot but did admit that the funds to workers and companies in crisis had been distributed without control: “There was no grand plan, but there was a big fraud”, said Griñán at the time (who has also now been protected by the Constitutional Court). “I refer to what the Constitutional Court has said: there was no plot to commit fraud”, replied Chaves.
He also appeared to be uncompromising when asked if there was little care in making some senior appointments in the Employment Department, which distributed the funds from the ERE: “What was happening or could have happened or not in the Employment Department… I don’t know.”
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