This time it did not take 24 hours for the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, to react to one of the derivatives of the Salazar affair, after elDiario.es revealed this Sunday the protection granted by Antonio Hernández to the behavior of his boss and friend, according to the complainants.
Next Tuesday’s Council of Ministers will dismiss Hernández from his post as director of the political coordination department of the Cabinet of the Presidency of the Government. The departure was coordinated by Sánchez’s chief of staff, Diego Rubio, and the first vice president, María Jesús Montero, that same Sunday, despite the fact that the person mentioned by the plaintiffs as Salazar’s accomplice and accomplice denied the facts, as did the members of his department questioned about the scandal.
Montero also decided to remove him from the executive of the PSOE of Andalusia, where Hernández was responsible for the Secretariat of Data, Analysis and Foresight, although José Antonio Rodríguez Salas and Francisco Rodríguez, two socialists very close to Sánchez’s former advisor, remain in the leadership for the moment.
Salazar had Antonio Hernández in Moncloa as the man of his greatest personal confidence and he always acted as his “number two”. Although he presents himself as an “expert in electoral campaign management, political and social sciences”, the official qualification he accredits in his profile on the transparency portal is a professional training diploma as a technical specialist in advertising. Until now, as director of the Political Coordination Department of the Office of the Presidency of the Government, he was in charge of a large team of professionals qualified at the highest level.
Part of this team, composed mainly of women, suffered “humiliating, humiliating and misogynistic” behavior from Salazar, according to the complaints. One of the victims stated in his complaint that none of Francisco Salazar’s behavior towards women “would have been possible without the special collaboration of his faithful Antonio Hernández Espinal.” “A man – adds the writing recorded on the PSOE anti-harassment channel by one of the complainants – who spent his life teaching so that we did not see Paco and his behavior as they were. Antonio constantly put the spotlight on us, making us doubt our perceptions and our own reality. He told us tirelessly that we did not value where we were, that anyone would kill to be us.”
Another aide to Salazar and Hernández in the executive engine room explains it more graphically. “Antonio is Paco’s butler.” Both worked under Pedro Sánchez’s first chief of staff, Iván Redondo, who was dismissed in 2021 as part of a government restructuring the president was facing, and from which Salazar also left, although two years later he returned to La Moncloa.
The people harassed by Salazar did not file a complaint with the government, but they filed a complaint with the PSOE anti-harassment channel, so in Moncloa until this Sunday they were not aware of the role played by Hernández in the face of Salazar’s sexist attitudes, which they consider “fundamental” for the former Sánchez advisor to act with impunity.
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