The PSOE fails to shake off the Ábalos case at a critical moment, with less than two weeks to go before the Andalusian elections. The fourth day of the campaign coincided with the testimony of the former Minister of Development and former socialist Organization Secretary as an accused in the Supreme Court. The scenario contemplated in La Moncloa and Ferraz was that the interrogation would take place last Thursday, the day the campaign started, but it was ultimately delayed until Monday.
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The party’s official thesis is that the damage caused to its reputation by the alleged corruption scheme is already amortized, although ministers and PSOE leaders agree that the image of the former number three of the party in the trial before the court “is a dose of reminder” that penalizes them in an electoral event. “Our goal is to mobilize the almost 600,000 Andalusians who voted in the last summer 2023 general elections but did not vote in the regional elections a year earlier, and this certainly does not help,” adds one of the provincial secretaries of the community.
The Government has mobilized several ministers to try to move on and mark as much distance as possible from Ábalos. Félix Bolaños recalled that the party “acted swiftly and decisively” when it had “the first indications of irregular behavior.” “There was not even an open judicial investigation, not even that, and the PSOE already removed them from all responsibility and membership,” he highlighted about the former minister. The PSOE opened a file on Ábalos and suspended him provisionally as a member after the initially known Koldo case exploded in February 2024, but he did not lose his membership status until June 2025, after his successor in Organization, Santos Cerdán, was involved in another alleged offshoot of the criminal network.
Óscar López also insisted on the speed with which action was taken, unlike the PP in other crises. “The PSOE and the Government were exemplary, forceful, and very quick. I worked with [Alfredo Pérez] Rubalcaba when we experienced what we experienced with Gürtel in 2009. There was no trial until 2018. For nine years the PP dedicated itself to destroying evidence and protecting those who have been convicted,” differentiated the Minister for Digital Transformation and Digital Function and Secretary General of the PSOE of Madrid. “No one is free from having some case. One thing is to have some case and another to have an institutionalized system. The important thing is how one acts; what I know is that the Government, the PSOE, and the president, as soon as we became aware, acted decisively,” he reiterated on La Hora de la 1 of RTVE.
Ángel Víctor Torres defended on COPE the “immediate” action in February 2024, when the case had just become known and only the tip of the iceberg was known. “The executive removed Ábalos, who was a deputy, and there was not even an indictment then. This horrifies us because we are a party of millions of voters, with honest and hardworking people who get up to work looking others in the eye… In every organization, there are people who deviate from exemplary norms, and those people must be removed, always taking into account the presumption of innocence. We are already in the final hours of the trial from which we expect a sentence,” observed the Territorial Policy official.
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Sánchez, “the invisible hand” of corruption according to the PP
The PP has judged the Ábalos case as “scandalous and very serious” and has raised the stakes against the head of government. Deputy Secretary Elías Bendodo accused Sánchez of being “the invisible hand of all corruption cases.”
The popular leader also took advantage of Ábalos’s testimony to attack the socialist candidate in the Andalusian elections. “María Jesús Montero and corruption have a special, intimate relationship,” Bendodo stated. “Sanchismo has been seized by a nervous breakdown since ten this morning,” joked the PP leader regarding the testimony of the former minister and former socialist Organization Secretary in the Supreme Court. “Sánchez has a problem of corruption and incompetence,” he continued. “There is a core element, the alleged illegal financing of the PSOE. Sánchez, as number one of the party, and watch out, María Jesús Montero, as number two of the party. If María Jesús Montero knew nothing about all this, bad because she was unaware of anything. If she knew and kept silent, worse,” he added. Asked whether the PP also considers scandalous and serious what Chief Inspector Manuel Morocho, the main investigator of the Gürtel case, declared before the court, stating that the operation to spy on the former PP treasurer Luis Bárcenas lacked legal backing and recounting the pressures he suffered and attempts to remove him, Bendodo avoided commenting on the substance. Instead, he responded that this process deals with facts “almost from the last century.” “If the Government thinks it will cover all its current corruption with facts from 15 years ago, it is clear that the Government is very desperate,” he concluded.
An autonomous secretary general of the PSOE shares part of that reasoning. “Nothing new is coming out, but the wear and tear is what it is no matter how much we try to downplay it by equating it with Kitchen. We have to cut this off; it has not let us start the week [in the Andalusian campaign] more cleanly,” he laments. A provincial secretary adds that, meanwhile, the mask case scheme of the Almería Provincial Council, which investigates an alleged irregular minor works contracting scheme centered in the entity between 2016 and 2021 and affecting its former president Javier Aureliano García (PP), does not have the same media coverage. Those charged in this case will begin to testify before the judge starting May 28.
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