Pedro Sánchez accuses the coup of a new hellish week for the government and especially for the PSOE, inflamed once again by the disastrous management of the government. Paco Salazar affairthese are accusations of sexual harassment against the one who was one of the most prominent men of its hard core, who in June published the first information about the scandal on elDiario.es. Six months later, the party only remained in contact with the victims this week. The end of the year is very difficult for a government because political problems accumulate following the rupture of judgments and also at the level of the courts, now that a judge of the National Audience has asked the PSOE for all the justifications for the expenditures of the last eight years. Faced with this situation, the president clings to the defense of public health and education in the face of the privatization processes of the PP communities and, in particular, the Torrejón hospital scandal revealed by this newspaper.
Sánchez spoke in depth about this subject at the end of this Saturday with several journalists, during a press conference in Congress on Constitution Day, and I also wanted to show, with his tone of guilt, that he is aware of the enormous attrition that he considered a “mistake” that is going to be resolved, and I am not them. victims, do not stay in contact with them.
But when he recognized his mistakes and admitted “in the first person”, as a leader, these errors, Sánchez made it clear that he was not going to remove anyone from office for this matter that he considers a mistake, but without bad intention and in no case did he have “collusion” with the harasser, who was very close to Sánchez on the field, but a good part of her. current leadership of the PSOE – he declared that he was his new man, strong until the scandal forced him to resolve it – and he also showed his confidence in his ability to overcome this crisis and regain his momentum to be able to conclude the legislature.
The leader of the PSOE admits that Salazar was a blow, another plus in his entourage, after José Luis Ábalos and Santos Cerdán, something that directly underlines his credibility at the time of electing his men of maximum confidence – until now he has had no problem with the women of his team – but he is convinced that at that moment. and will not result in “legal cause or error.”
Sánchez and his PSOE team are preparing measures to strengthen the anti-acoso system with more measures, but above all they are trying to close as quickly as possible, next week, if possible, the opportunity for this file to take measures and above all support the victims.
The president explains that the PSOE could not go directly to the inspection to denounce Salazar, as requested by leader Adriana Lastra, one of the first people who insisted that the Andalusian politician be fired in July, because it was necessary for the victims to decide if they wanted to do so, even if they were anonymous complaints. Socialists can do nothing to facilitate the discovery of their identity if they do not make it public. But it is only possible to support them so that they denounce and put all the media, including lawyers, at their service, and this is what we can deduce from the remarks made by the president to the press.
Sánchez’s change of tone in front of the press, after having avoided the crisis of the Salazar case for several days in his public speeches and even in his electoral campaigns in Extremadura, is significant. At the top of the government and the PSOE, there was no courage to minimize the crisis after a week in which internal tension had been high because a party born from the scandalous audios of José Luis Ábalos and Koldo García, in which they spoke of prostituted women as if they were won, could not afford the upsetting image of not having treated the victims of an accident in its own ranks and within La Moncloa, where Salazar occupied an important position with a large team in which there were several women. In another corridor of Congress, the first vice-president, María Jesús Montero, was included a little more than Sánchez and admitted that the matter “was very poorly managed” because the party, of which she is part, “did not follow up properly” with the victims.
All eyes are on the organization’s secretary, Rebeca Torró, but Sánchez clearly states that there is no need to look for culprits, because none of them had bad intentions, nor did the women of the anti-accusation committee who went six months without coming forward. He takes responsibility directly, he insisted, and he doesn’t seem to have any intention of stopping Nadie. In addition, he was elected and maintained for seven years by Salazar, who left Moncloa after Iván Redondo, in 2021, and went to work at the Madrid racetrack, but returned shortly after by order of the president to join the team with Óscar López as chief of staff.
The government thus accuses the blow to the credibility of the president and the new team that was appointed to the PSOE to highlight Santos Cerdán, accused in a serious corruption case, but in the environment of the president he is working on a very different scenario from that involved in the Salazar affair. Sánchez insists that there is a legislature to ratify, and he is fully focused on the recovery of Junts with several gestures that he launched this week and others that will be sold in the coming days, after the liberation of La Moncloa, and also in the electoral campaigns that will probably be four in a few months: Extremadura, already in power, Castile and León, Andalusia and now Aragon, which could arrive in fever. Future prospects are so many suitcases. However, Sánchez believes that in some legislative elections things would be different and that currently, according to his data, the PSOE would be the first party. This would only be possible if Vox grew a lot and took up a lot of space on the PP. The PSOE could be the first party and not govern because the government could disappear due to the weakness of the left space of the socialists.
In any case, Sánchez is ready to abandon Parliament because he believes that no one, not even together, wants to finish it before too long, and he hopes that the progress of the economy and the data of good management will eventually cover all the scandals and the attrition that this entails. This is why all the ministers and close leaders consulted insist on the fact that there is no possible electoral adelanto scenario, because they have time, they believe, to play in favor of the Government. The PP believes, on the contrary, that the deterioration is unstoppable and will get even worse.
The president and his team are trying to regain control of the agenda with a fundamental battle, the defense of public health and education in the face of the processes of privatization of the PP communities. Sánchez gave the order to focus as much as possible on the crisis at the privately run Torrejón Hospital in Madrid, where instructions were given to those responsible to harm certain patients to make more money. This time the Council of Ministers will be dominated by this issue and, over the weekend, the measures will be finalized to present Mónica García and end a new battle against Isabel Díaz Ayuso, but above all against the privatization model of the PP. In La Moncloa, I believe that, despite scandals and cases like that of Salazar, where only those who are very dependent on politics remain, citizens are really suffering from the deterioration of public services in the autonomies governed by the PP, who is the great mayor, and this will be the expression of Sánchez’s speech in the coming months. The PSOE will probably be weakened by the sequence of autonomous elections, but the government also believes that Vox will have more strength in these executions with the PP and this will see the more damaging effects of what could reach La Moncloa in 2027.
This will be the big battle of the coming months. For the moment, the PSOE is still involved in the Salazar case, which it will try to resolve this week. And then, I rest at Christmas and I think about it with fever, when I return to Congress and the votes, the key to the pension increase. Sánchez bromeó with this idea of the difference between those who live in the political world and the reality of the street in conversation with journalists: “we are now addicted to politics, dependent on every movement, but normal people think about Christmas shopping”.