Paco Salazar (Montellano, Seville, 57 years old) is standing at the PSOE. The last straw for the PSOE feminists brings the captures and wanderings of José Luis Ábalos and Koldo García. A type of village that outraged and motivated an organization of around 150,000 activists because of complaints of sexual harassment and abuse of power made by two socialist activists and workers from Salazar’s team in Moncloa. “If the bragging got to your face, he was making love and asking us to see the escort,” he wrote exclusively to elDiario.es.
Salazar was appointed secretary general of the Institutional Coordination of the Presidency of Government and left the party at the latest on July 5. Those who speak to him say that everything is blocked: “I want to erase it.” “As he did not want to defend himself, he did not say the opposite, he did it,” assures an Andalusian leader. That day he was mayor of Jun and one of his closest collaborators, José Antonio Rodríguez Salas, took him in his coach from Madrid to his house in Dos Hermanas. He said he doesn’t control the phone number, doesn’t see news or meetings he’s such a fan of.
On July 5, Salazar entered the federal executive as assistant to the Organizational Secretariat in charge of Rebeca Torró, who replaced Santos Cerdán, then imprisoned for alleged corruption. “This job was your dream,” Ferraz said. All sources attribute the election of Torró not to Pedro Sánchez, but to Salazar who considered himself the future director of an area all the more important to the PSOE, especially if the secretary general is also president of the government. This could be Sánchez’s eyes in Ferraz after the double fiasco of Cerdán and Ábalos.
Nadie, from the PSOE, claims to have witnessed the behaviors described in the denunciations, but the people who dealt with him recognized as Salazar’s habits that “salía del servicio sin ascending the cremallera” and that a phrase suya assidua es: “I’m going to solve it with my barbecue.” Sources from his team in Moncloa añaden add: “I was able to stage incredible reprimands and make sexist comments, and so we saw a lot of people.” They transfer other “babies” led with their team made up of very young people, particularly women.
How can a person who has been mayor of his city be part of the circle of trust of the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez? Salazar does not undertake this journey from a strong organic position within the PSOE. Nothing has ever been painted at the PSOE in Seville or Andalusia. He belonged to a powerful socialist tribe, originally from Dos Hermanas, but he had no money. He was an Indian, but he was not the chief of the Indians. “His value towards Pedro Sánchez is not his specific weight in the PSOE of Seville, as long as he leaves Teruel,” assures a leader.
When the town of Montellano (7,031 inhabitants) died in 2008 – hotbed of controversies over the attempt to regularize certain illegal houses – he moved to live in Dos Hermanas. It passes through different locations of the Junta (comisario de la Memoria Democrática) and the Emasesa municipal company of Seville until reaching the works of the Dos Hermanas racetrack through the Servicio Andaluz de Empleo. Between conversations about horsemen and horsemen, he became friends with the Nazarene mayor at the time, Quico Toscano, Pedro Sánchez’s main supporter.
In 2012 he started working at the Ayuntamiento de Dos Hermanas as a technician until 2017. There was a dispute between Vox and Salazar and Toscano for professional misconduct, influence peddling and administrative malpractice. The ultra-durable party which collected its municipal nominations for a few months by working for the primaries of Pedro Sánchez. Municipal sources assure that everything is under control: Salazar is planning his own projects and vacancies to be alongside the future leader.
When Sánchez resigned from the federal committee on October 1, 2016 and decided, after weeks of doubts, to run in the primaries to aspire again to the general secretariat, Salazar returned and joined him. He packed his suitcase and moved to Madrid, managed the campaign team, organized the activist platform through WhatsApp groups from all over Spain and worked closely with Ábalos, Adriana Lastra and Cerdán, with whom he shared the floor. He faced as a rival the President of the Council, Susana Díaz, who believed she had superpowers, but he lost this internal election in May 2017.
While serving in Ferraz, Salazar was dazzled by Iván Redondo, hired by Sánchez as an advisor. A graduate in Political Science from UNED, he learned data analysis, statistical and electoral trends. He also holds the title of agricultural expert. But the arrow with the political consultant raises fears and the shadow of Ábalos and Cerdán. With Lastra, there is never a special tuning hub. The bitter tension that the socialist general vice-secretariat then had with Iván Redondo ended up driving them apart.
With Pedro Sánchez inaugurated as president after the success of the first motion to censure democracy, Salazar moved with Redondo to Moncloa. They all imagined strategies, some successful, others disastrous, such as repeating the elections of November 2019 and those of the Community of Madrid in May 2021, which they believed to be victorious. Fuentes de Ferraz assured that both used the electoral analysis zone of Moncloa as an “extension” of the party’s organizational secretariat and from where the general secretariats were cited to facilitate information. Los dos salen de Moncloa in the government crisis of July 2021. Salazar goes to the Zarzuela hipódromo, takes oxygen, and Sánchez recovers a year later as Secretary General of Political Planning. He also played an important role in Salvador Illa’s campaign for president of the Generalitat, which won the CPS.
Salazar, a Pedrista from the first minute, was someone Sánchez trusted completely, several socialist sources assured. “Pedro, who lives attached to the investigations, trusts a lot of people and Paco was totally reliable. He brought him first to Moncloa and was the last to leave. He didn’t ask for anything in return. The president could call him five or six times a day. And all that generates a lot of cellos,” says a manager.
Salazar’s ratings as a political analyst fluctuate between the ceiling and 10, in the role of interlocutor. “It was a ghost,” they say; “I’m going to be a good analyst and know how to read surveys, but that’s not how I get the data”; “He was agile, he had a talent for analyzing survey data. He had good thoughts.” Salazar, according to those who worked with him, had a ritual on Election Day to earn money from the team while the revenue was being produced: “I got a coin but didn’t see it come out. This time I left the cross.”
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