The political pressure over the Leire Díez case is so strong that Pedro Sánchez has been forced to clearly address the press to distance himself from the espionage operations carried out by this former PSOE militant, who was paid at the time by the party and acted under the orders of Santos Cerdán, then secretary of organization and a man of absolute trust to the president.
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Sánchez has insisted several times in Montenegro, where he is to participate in an EU summit, that Cerdán never informed him of this operation, and has also pointed out that he did not do so because he knew Sánchez would not have tolerated it. “The information of these days fills me with indignation,” Sánchez began even before questions started. “I have never known or been informed of Leire Díez’s escapades, and if it wasn’t done, it’s because I would never have tolerated them.” The president has indicated that the PSOE is studying the situation to see if it will file a lawsuit against Díez.
Sánchez went further to defend that he knew nothing, something that the UCO questions in its reports, where it consistently points to him as the main beneficiary of Leire Díez’s espionage operations against the investigators of cases affecting his family. “I don’t do what was done to me,” he said after recalling that, while he was leader of the opposition, the police under the orders of Mariano Rajoy’s government opened a secret investigation into his father-in-law’s saunas to weaken him.
“The so-called patriotic police spied on me when I was leader of the opposition. The government used state resources to try to stop investigations against the PP. That ended with the motion of no confidence. We are a clean government. We are not going to allow the corrupt practices of a few and a disruptive opposition to cover up a management that has record levels of employment, growth, and social spending and is an international benchmark,” insisted the president, thus clinging to the defense that the PSOE has adopted these days, which is that everything that could have happened has only one person responsible: Santos Cerdán, who is now out of the party.
The key to the whole case, from a political point of view, is whether Sánchez knew about these operations or not, because anything that proved he did know would be devastating for him. Only Cerdán could confirm if the president knew, but the former Secretary of Organization is denying the entire operation and today insisted on that idea through his lawyers. The entire government has set out to insist that Sánchez knew nothing, but the pressure is so strong that he has had to come out and say it himself after many days of silence on this issue that monopolizes Spanish political news. The PSOE’s silence is deafening, and its general secretary has come out to fill it when no one else in his organization has yet given any explanation about the case.
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Sánchez thus tries to at least temporarily plug the enormous leak in the credibility of the PSOE and the Government with this case. The president has no intention of offering any new political scapegoat, neither the party’s manager, already indicted in this case, nor the director of the Civil Guard, Mercedes González, who has now admitted that she met up to three times — she remembers two, but does not rule out a possible third — with Leire Díez. González maintains that the first two meetings had no important content, they were brief initial contacts, and in the last one, Díez did ask her to reinstate a commander removed for his involvement in the Koldo case. There, according to her version, she flatly rejected it and both the meeting and the relationship ended.
Sánchez has defended his director of the Civil Guard amidst an internal war within this institution. “I believe that the director general of the Civil Guard gave explanations yesterday, and from the Government and from the Ministry of Interior itself, confidence in the professionalism and honesty of the director general of the Civil Guard has been expressed. I can only support those statements and convey that confidence and support for her,” said Sánchez, who also defended Cristina Narbona, the president of the PSOE, who met once with Díez.
The president also insisted that the legislature will end and for that, he will try to mend his relationship with Junts and convince the PNV to support the Budgets, but in any case, he has flatly ruled out a “super Sunday” election, that is, regional, municipal, and general elections on the same day. “I can guarantee, actively and passively, to all parties and all citizens that there will be no electoral super Sunday,” he insisted.
