About to end a very complicated year for the government and for the PSOE – besieged by cases of corruption and sexual harassment in its ranks and which has just suffered a severe defeat in Extremadura – its first vice-president and deputy general secretary, María Jesús Montero, gave an interview to Radio Seville by Cadena Ser in which she addresses these issues, but also the situation in Andalusia, where, in 2026, she will also present herself as a socialist candidate for the Council. “Moreno is not trustworthy,” says Montero in reference to the lack of explanations and inaction in issues similar to those that have exhausted the Central Executive and the party that supports it, such as corruption within the PP of Almería, the complaint for alleged sexual harassment of the mayor of Algeciras, or the lack of answers in the testing crisis. Throughout the intervention, the Minister of Finance did not lose sight of the reality of this community and weaved the defense of its management at the national level with the benefits that result for the Andalusians. And at this point he referred to the new financing model: a constant request of the popular baron and in which he supports the criticisms of underfinancing and the comparative grievance with Catalonia: “I have the very advanced model and I hope that the PP will support it”.
In the week which immediately followed the debacle of the PSOE in one of its traditional strongholds, Extremadura, and without the party leader having appeared publicly to give explanations, Montero summarized the defeat in two precise elements: “the accusation of the candidate to the junta of Extremadura itself”, Miguel Ángel Gallardo – whose resignation “honors” him -, and the abstention. “Our political rival is not the right, it is not the PP, it is abstention itself,” declared the PSOE leader. The mobilization of the socialist electorate will be essential, she argued, to avoid repeating these bad results in the next elections with next year’s polls: Aragon, Castilla y León and Andalusia, where it is also examined.
Montero does not plan to abandon his position at the head of the central government to concentrate on the race for the Junta de Andalucía, unless Pedro Sánchez decides to do so. “It depends on the president,” he said during his interview with journalist Diego Suárez. “I want to present the financing model, I want to present the budgets, I want to present all these instruments that allow us to bet on Andalusia,” he emphasized about the most immediate tasks that he will have on the table as head of the Treasury.
Both projects, he assured, are very advanced. In the case of public accounts, they have been prepared and are being negotiated with the rest of the parliamentary groups, he stressed. As for whether Junts, who formalized his break with the PSOE a few months ago, is also included in this series of contacts, Montero was much less explicit. “I think it’s better that they say it,” she said, while expressing confidence that they support both the budgets and the financing model “and can add to this perspective of giving greater autonomy to the territories.”
Regarding the new system of distribution of financial resources between communities, the vice-president also avoided saying expressly whether it will include the criterion of ordinality – “the important thing is the performance that the financing model can give to the whole model and when we have the capacity to see it, we will see the different variables” – but she assured that it would benefit Andalusia and expressed her desire to compare it with that of the Andalusian president, who made financing one of the main axes of confrontation not only with the government, but with Montero herself, who, when she was a Treasury Board advisor, led the demand for a new funding model to replace the current one, extremely unfair to the community: “If you don’t share the model I’m presenting, let them say what their alternative is. What would the PP vote for?
“Absolute majority deadlock”
Faced with this lack of alternatives on the part of the Andalusian president – whether due to what he considers the absence of his own political project which has benefited Andalusia, or in his reaction to the latest crises which have affected the Commission, such as the failures of the projections, the case masks of the Almería Provincial Delegation or the complaint filed with the Algeciras Mayor’s Office for alleged sexual harassment -, Montero focused his criticism on Moreno, of whom he declared to have an “absolute majority in embarrassment”.
Much of the criticism has focused on the poor management of the Andalusian health system, the tip of the iceberg of which appeared with the failures of screening. Here too, Montero questioned the lack of precision on the part of the popular baron regarding the structural reform that he announced in the Andalusian Health Service, seven years after assuming the presidency of the Council. “Moreno defended that health is not a problem of resources, that it is a problem of management, that it is a problem of political orientation, that it is a problem of model and my hair stands on end when I hear the President of the Council say that he wants to overhaul the model. Where does he want to go?” asked the vice-president, who issued the following warning: “Moreno wants to flirt not only with privatization but with certain elements like the co-payment”. The socialist candidate for the presidency of the Community demanded that her opponent reveal, before the elections, “what he has in mind when he speaks of the public service model as an outdated model”.
Regarding the screening crisis and – yet another lack of information – the lack of specificity in the number of women affected by the delays who developed a tumor while waiting to take the second confirmatory test, Montero was clear: “They don’t say it because there are probably many of them and because they don’t want to explain themselves to citizens. I am a doctor, it is a catastrophe and it speaks very poorly of the functioning that Mr. Moreno Bonilla has given to the health system.”
The socialist leader also questioned the fact that the Andalusian government maintains in office the three leaders of SAS accused of alleged abuses in the awarding of health emergency contracts, without legislative authorization, in one of the two legal cases, as well as in the investigation into the alleged sharing of prices to be awarded manually, of materials and health services in the province of Cádiz. “That there are people accused in this environment and they have not resigned from office seems great to me,” he said. On both legal fronts, the vice-president assured that she “sees very clearly the judicial and patrimonial responsibilities” on the part of the Council.
Regarding the accusation of Vicente Fernández, a close collaborator of Montero when she was Andalusian Minister of the Treasury and who she promoted to president of SEPI, the socialist leader limited the conduct that is the subject of the investigation to the years in which she had already left this public post and assured that she was unaware that he had gone to work in an office that handled the accusation of the ERE case, which, she assured, seems “absurdity”. The situation was made worse with the corruption of the PP in the Provincial Council of Almería and Moreno’s reaction: “I knew it, because there were people who were under judicial investigation.” “I noticed that Mr. Moreno Bonilla, regarding this matter that is taking place in Andalusia, said that they did not answer his phone,” he emphasized, regarding the first explanations given by the leader of the Andalusian PP after learning that the president of the Foral Delegation of Almería, Javier Aureliano García, had been arrested, and he recognized that no one from his party in that province responded to his calls.
“Is a president trustworthy who thinks that others must answer this question; who demands that others answer questions that he does not answer; who demands exemplary behavior in terms of gender violence or harassment of women and yet who does not give explanations, does not give answers about what is happening in his own ranks?” Montero asked to mix the issue of corruption with that of sexual harassment in Algeciras. The general secretary of the Andalusian PSOE questioned the fact that Moreno ignored the case that affects councilor José Ignacio Landaluce, who, although he resigned from his position in the PP, is reluctant to abandon the leadership, and that he affirms that “there is nothing he can do to remove him from his position as mayor.” Montero once again reiterated the support of the PSOE councilors for a motion of censure with the councilors of the PP, which governs with the absolute majority, an option that the regional popular leadership does not consider because it claims that the majority is loyal to Landaluce.
Previously, Montero had also discussed the handling of harassment cases within his own party. THE number two The president of the PSOE was “proud” of her party, because it made activism incompatible with prostitution and was the first to become “a safe place where women can denounce” with the creation of the anonymous complaints channel. The socialist leader, who did not specify whether her training would take place Salazar affair Before the prosecution, he rejected the fact that the accusations of alleged harassment among his activists “give a false impression that in my party there are more men or sexist harassers than in the rest of society”. “Machismo in our society is structural and crosses all organizations,” he stressed.
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