Pedro Sanchez continues to opt for a political strategy consisting of publicly assuming “responsibility” for the scandals affecting the government, without these having any real consequences for it.
This Saturday, the president tried to resolve the scandal involving Paco Salazar, describing as a simple “error” the fact that the PSOE has not dealt for five months with the complaints filed by two women against their former advisor, in the party’s internal channels, for alleged sexual harassment.
In an informal conversation with journalists after the events of Constitution Day, Sánchez assured that he took “in the first person” responsibility for what he described as “an error in speed and dialogue with the victims.”
Pedro Sánchez thus reproduces the strategy he applied in the face of the scandals which affected the last two organizational secretaries of the party: Jose Luis Abalos and Santos Cerdan.
“I asked for forgiveness and I I took responsibility for the situation caused by Ábalos and Santos Cerdán“, Sánchez said on Tuesday, when he gave interviews to RAC1 and TVE.
In all three cases, according to the president of the government, his personal “responsibility” consisted of dismissing these three close collaborators from their positions.
But without any consequences for Sánchez himself, because of the guilt looking which implies having appointed to positions of maximum trust, in the party and in the government, people whose conduct presents criminal characteristics.
Pedro Sánchez had to give up appointing Paco Salazar as deputy to the Party’s Organizational Secretariat on July 5, when the testimonies of different women who accused him of inappropriate behavior, both within the party and at Moncloa, were revealed.
Sánchez then encouraged activists to denounce in internal party channels any situation from which they suffer “sexual assault or harassment”.
This was done a few hours later by two women, who claim to have been harassed by Paco Salazar, then advisor to the president at Moncloa.
However, five months later, the PSOE had not even contacted these two affiliates to ratify their testimony.
The two complaints even disappeared from the platform activated by the party. Something that the leadership of the PSOE attributes to a “data obfuscation” computer problem.
In front of journalists, Sánchez assured this Saturday that it was an involuntary “error” and that there was no desire to “hide” his former collaborator.
In making these statements, Sánchez ignored that the minister’s spokesperson, Pilar Alegría, was discovered barely a month ago eating with Paco Salazar, as revealed by a newspaper, when complaints of alleged sexual harassment had already been revealed.
Asked about the said meeting, Sánchez indicated that “I don’t know if the order was given to be with him.“.
The president of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, accused Sánchez of “hypocrisy” this Saturday and said he was convinced that “he knew it and covered it up,” he said in reference to the Paco Salazar scandal.
In statements to the media before the institutional Constitution Day event, the opposition leader said that Sánchez “has been living with him in La Moncloa for six months” and that he must “be aware of the complaints of Mr. Salazar’s colleagues.”
However, the president claims he learned of the sexual harassment allegations “through the media.”
In the same way that he maintained, in his interview on Tuesday, that the former minister Jose Luis Abalos It was for him”a great stranger personally“.
However, regarding this latest statement, former Vice President Carmen Calvo He recently admitted that in 2021 he directly informed the president about rumors regarding Ábalos’ private life when he was Minister of Transport.
After several days of silence, the PSOE sent a note to its members on Friday to apologize for the Salazar affair and recognizing that “we did not live up to our principles.”
Internal unrest has generated significant movements. The federations of Asturias and Galicia are actively lobbying for the PSOE to file complaints against Salazar with the public prosecutor’s office.
Sánchez affirmed on Saturday that the PSOE could not do so, because they were anonymous complaints. But he assured that the party would support the victims if they decide to bring the facts to the attention of the prosecution.
The case of Torremolinos
But a similar case happened this week in Malaga: the PSOE sacked its general secretary in Torremolinos, Antonio Navarroonly after learning that he had been denounced by an adviser to his party, also for alleged sexual harassment.
Faced with the lack of response from Ferraz, who twice ignored internal complaints, the woman was finally forced to go to the prosecutor’s office.
Sources from the Andalusian PSOE now claim that the victim went to the public prosecutor’s office not because she had been ignored internally, but “for fear of physical attack”.
However, the PSOE leadership admitted this Saturday that Vice President María Jesús Montero, He had an interview with the complainant after the scandal broke.
The same sources assure that Montero “totally believes” the womangiven the “relationship of trust” established between the two, since they have known each other for several years.
The PSOE Equality Secretariat in Malaga issued a public statement, joined by hundreds of Andalusian activists, in which it demanded that the party “act forcefully” in the face of cases of harassment.
The Malaga declaration includes a thinly veiled criticism of the actions of the PSOE leadership, demanding that “honor your feminist history not only with words, but also with actions“.
Because feminism, he adds, cannot be a simple “decorative” speech for the PSOE.