It seems like a lot more, but the government has just completed three months. Just a month ago, despite the difficulties and pressure from the opposition, the executive hoped to get the amnesty law and with it the budgets and the legislature off the ground. But since Junts decided to vote against the bill on January 30, things have become more complicated. And the setback of the elections in Galicia, which revived doubts about the left's territorial weakness, was followed by the hole in the Koldo case, the first relevant corruption scandal since Sánchez arrived in La Moncloa in 2018. The challenge of José Luis Ábalos, who has decided to entrench himself in his seat and move to the Mixed Group, assuming that the PSOE will exclude him as long as he does not lose the record, therefore comes at a particularly delicate time.
The end of this political drama within the PSOE and the hard core of those who accompanied Sánchez in his adventure in the 2017 primaries, in which Ábalos always played a prominent role, has devastated these socialist leaders. Many of them expressed, publicly and privately, their confusion at the stance of the former organizing secretary, who has decided to challenge the party in which he has been active for most of his life – after a brief jump to the PCE – and to the Mixed Party to change group and therefore assume his expulsion in order to continue with the salary of a representative and the protection of the capacity from possible future investigations in Congress. “This matter causes us great pain,” summarized spokeswoman Patxi López. “This is not in line with the career of Ábalos, who was an exemplary socialist.” “Joining the mixed group is not a decision at your level,” concluded Óscar Puente, Minister of Transport, whose portfolio was held by the former organizing secretary.
Ábalos insists he is not leaving because that would mean taking on his guilt: “I cannot end my career as a corrupt person if I am innocent.” But Puente cited the example of Josep Borrell, who died in 1999 gave up the leadership of the PSOE because of a scandal that two of his employees had defrauded money from the Ministry of Finance, the ministry he headed. Nobody ever accused Borrell of corruption for this, Puente explained; he simply took political responsibility for what his subordinates did. It is the same as what they asked of Ábalos for giving a lot of power in his ministry to Koldo García, who was imprisoned for allegedly illegal commissions for contracts to buy masks during a pandemic. It was Cristina Narbona herself, president of the PSOE and Borrell's partner, who raised this example this Monday in the executive in which it was decided to ask Ábalos for the protocol.
Ábalos, in the House of Representatives.Samuel Sánchez
But the former minister paid no attention to these arguments and decided to challenge the party and the leader and announce his move to the Mixed Group, where he will share the seat with Podemos MPs and another former minister, Ione Belarra. Ábalos insists that he is staying not for economic reasons but for political reasons, to defend his name, but in the PSOE the idea has taken hold that money and capacity are the two main reasons for this, nothing less than expulsion from the party He joined the mixed group, which he strongly condemned as organizing secretary.
In fact, Ábalos also assumed discipline at a crucial moment, in 2016, when the manager who led the PSOE after the dismissal of Pedro Sánchez ordered her deputies to abstain from the inauguration of Mariano Rajoy. Sánchez left the seat to avoid having to comply with this order, Ábalos retained it and abstained for reasons of discipline, although he continued to support the current government president and supported him in the 2017 primaries.
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The crisis is very important, especially from a symbolic point of view: a former organizing secretary of the PSOE moves to the Mixed Group, an image that seemed impossible, following a corruption scandal involving one of his key collaborators. And it also comes at a particularly delicate moment, when the PP, euphoric after the success in Galicia, is pushing hard, convinced that the Sánchez government is on the road to political collapse. However, various sources from both the government and the PSOE indicate that if Ábalos continues to vote for the PSOE, which is a given for them, this crisis, which no one minimizes, will have no relevant consequences for the executive. The former minister himself assured that he would continue to support the government when he conferred this Tuesday in the halls of the Congress, while on his way To for the move to the Joint Congress. None of those who know him in the PSOE see him as having the opportunity to do anything differently. There is obviously no concern.
Sánchez will now try to regain the initiative starting this Wednesday, the day in which he faces a very difficult control meeting that will focus on the Koldo case. According to government sources, the president is preparing a counter-offensive comparing the response to the corruption cases of the PSOE and the PP in order to try to stop the attacks of Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who is having a nice moment after the success of the PP in the Galicia and the unexpected gift of the Koldo case. Sánchez had to resolve the crisis with Ábalos before this Wednesday in order to be able to give Feijóo a forceful response. But he was waiting for another way out, and now he finds his former organizing secretary already in the mixed doubles.
Ábalo's press conference in the House of Representatives, in which he announced that he was moving from the Socialist Group to the Mixed Group. Samuel Sanchez
Once this Wednesday's dire situation is over, in which Sánchez will claim he is ready to act “whoever falls”, and no matter how difficult the decision may be, his team is already working to address the two major issues at hand speed up the amnesty law and budgets and thus finally bring the legislature back on track in order to eliminate the idea of their endangerment.
“In four years there will be a lot of cycle changes,” Sánchez joked in Morocco last week after telling reporters that he had “all the time in the world” ahead of him to manage and resolve any crisis because the legislature has done so just started. At this point in time, the dimensions of the Koldo case that had just become known were not yet apparent. Even less could Sánchez imagine that six days later he would end up in the mixed group with a former organizing secretary. The government clings to this idea, to the time ahead and to the majority that has not been broken, and trusts that it will be able to continue and overcome this crisis too.
Since the end of the era of quiet majorities in Congress in 2015, everything has been happening at breakneck speed in the crazy script of Spanish politics. But Sánchez has shown in the past that he is the one who navigates this maelstrom best. The challenge of Ábalos has made it clear that the president does not always achieve his goal, even within the PSOE, because he failed to convince a former prominent member of the hard core to make a sacrifice for the good of the party . But Sánchez has shown on many occasions before that he can pull a game-changing card in the most complicated moments. Now it's his turn to prove that he can get the investiture back on track under any circumstances.
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