The Knives are Out

 As the ex-president José Maria Aznar said earlier this year, El que pueda hacer, que haga, or in English, ‘he who can do something, do something’!

This conservative leader was – and still is – keen to cause the fall of the Government – by any and all means. A call received loud and clear by many judges, police and the Media. The cloacas, as it’s called: the cesspit.

And how are things going today?

The economy is up and so is employment. Pensions have been raised and new rules are in place to tax the wealthy and the banks.

But the leading stories are the same: Begoña Gómez, the President’s wife, remains in the headlines. We learn this week that, yes, she is married to Pedro Sánchez, and further, that she only has a few bob in her bank account (maybe). The tenacious Judge Peinado remains biting at her heels.

The President’s brother, a musician, doesn’t after all have 1.4 million euros in his bank account, so there’s another door closed.

The President’s cat still hasn’t spilled the beans, but hopes are high…

All of this (except the cat) come from the denuncias of the far-right Manos Limpias, which is currently lodging complaints with the courts over the AEMET (State weather forecasters).

Maybe – just a thought – it’s time to close down this troublesome ‘pseudo-syndicate’.

Other attacks against the Government include a denuncia against the PSOE-appointed Attorney General Álvaro García Ortiz – one of five hundred people who saw an email regarding the boy-friend of Madrid regional leader Isabel Diaz Ayuso and may have leaked it to the media. Unlikely, but there you go. The email – sent out by Miguel Ángel Rodriguez, the head of Ayuso’s cabinet, concerned a (fake) confession that the boyfriend – Alberto González Amador – had neglected to declare some 350,000 euros to Hacienda by using false documents during the Covid pandemic. So far – while nothing much has happened to the boyfriend – the leader of the opposition PSOE in Madrid has resigned, having seen the bogus (secret) email and passed it on to a notary. In short – the inquiry is not (yet) interested in the fraud itself, but rather, over the leak to the media of a phony document sent out last February.

Yet another attack against the Government comes from a businessman called Victor de Aldama, ‘unconditionally’ jailed for a massive IVA fraud in October, and released last week (can this really be true?) after he claimed paying all kinds of bribery payments to various Socialist ministers. The PSOE deny the accusations.

Lastly, there’s the Koldo Affair.  

With all this excitement, taking an inside page are the stories about Zaplana remaining free from incarceration (10.5 years); Feijóo’s sister’s business dealings in Galicia; the connection between Ayuso’s boyfriend and the giant private-health company Quirón; the accusations of corruption against the Vice-president of the Madrid region Ana Millán; the refusal of Carlos Mazón to resign following the inept handling of the flooding in Valencia; and the revelations that family and colleagues of Rita Barberá (the mayor of Valencia from 1991 to 2015 who also under investigation when she died), defrauded the Treasury of over 631,287.65 euros between 2004 and 2008. (Yes, you read that right: and sixty five cents!) And so on.

It all depends, of course, on who controls the media that one prefers to read or watch.

But what says the conservative Corner about the PSOE (and its recent congress held in Seville): ‘The PSOE closes congress in Bulgarian style to rally around Sánchez and his government, besieged by corruption’. We read that ‘absent, were Felipe González and Alfonso Guerra, the historic leaders of the PSOE, who are highly critical of the current government and the populist drift of the PSOE’.

I’m not sure what the Bulgarian Style means – probably something bad.

While some judicial investigations in Spain are agonisingly slow, others move at warp-speed (usually to be filed under the heading of 'Lawfare').

A retired (‘progressive’) judge says: ‘We are facing a permanent judicial coup d'état’.

One must ask - what would be the program of the PP and their uncomfortable ally (beyond tumbling a successful progressive government) - tax cuts for the uber-wealthy and a ban on homosexual marriages?

El que pueda hacer, que haga.