The women of the PSOE are experiencing turbulent days due to the apparent intention of the party leadership to silence harassment complaints filed internally against Francisco Salazar, a trusted advisor to Pedro Sánchez. Only when Sanchez wanted Salazar agreed … In front of the party’s new executive director, some leaders, such as Adriana Lastra, raised their voices to prevent this. Salazar was excluded from the leadership of the party and officially removed from the heart of Sánchez, although it is already known that with Sánchez, those excluded because of their toxic relationships with women always have a second chance, as happened with José Luis Albalos.
The SWP is not good at managing the harassment of women and, more generally, the coherence between what it says about feminism and what it does with victims of masculinity. An emergency meeting called by her administration with equality officials to address their inaction regarding complaints against Salazar ended in failure. And it couldn’t end any other way, because Salazar is a trusted man for Sánchez, and Sánchez as General Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party condemns those who have been labeled sexual predators. The PSOE’s excuse is that its internal channel for anonymous complaints failed in July. Anyone who wants to be gullible can believe this version. Socialists have known about these complaints for a long time, and the responsibility for their failure lies with the leadership of the PSOE with the leaders, past or present, agreeing to the kind of pact of silence that was torpedoed when Sánchez wanted Salazar as the party’s executive director. Now it’s all just lamentations and claims to the Socialist Workers Party because the case has come to light, but any of the Socialist leaders who learn of this harassment can go – and they can do so today – to the Public Prosecutor’s Office so that an investigation can begin. The victims themselves can do this as well, as without their complaints it would not be possible to prosecute them.
Sumer’s ministers are also silent, concerned about the cloak of opacity with which their socialist partner covers internal complaints from women. There are already many episodes of misogyny in the history of the Socialist Workers’ Party led by Pedro Sánchez: the consumption of prostitution by people closely linked to Sánchez’s political life, the financing of the general secretary’s primaries with dirty money from the same company, and now, the cover-up of Francisco Salazar, the expectation that his cases will get tangled in the complexities of the party’s artificial organization and end up being buried under the statute of limitations.
The same people who encourage women to condemn the slightest gesture of masculinity are now reluctant to use the worst expressions of masculinity harassment, just so as not to upset a leader accused of falsely speaking about defending women. The famous #metoo movement, or its Spanish version of the phrase “Sister, I believe you”, has no branch in the PSOE, as no one has enough self-respect to submit, alone – or on his own – a simple piece of paper to the nearest prosecutor’s office denouncing the harassment that was, apparently, known in the corridors of Ferraz. The demands made by some socialist women to the socialist leadership to go to the Public Prosecution Office are a toast to the sun and a way to calm their conscience. Let them go, without waiting a minute, and give Sanchez #Metoo the coherence with her feminist struggle it demands, if not just lip service.