One hundred thousand people, according to the Popular Party (PP), which organized the rally, and 50,000 according to the government, the target of the protest, gathered yesterday in Madrid’s Plaza de España to protest against the ongoing institutional degradation and demand immediate elections. As the PP leader stated, “No one voted for him to do this.”
“This” refers to the grotesque spectacle that has been dominating the front pages of unofficial newspapers for weeks. It’s a truly surreal scene:
Leire Díez, a member of the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) who has held senior positions in various state-controlled companies (Correos, ENUSA, etc.), offered a businessman who fled Spanish justice a favorable deal from the prosecutor’s office if he revealed information that could compromise the head of the Civil Guard’s Central Operative Unit (UCO). The UCO is the unit working with judges on ongoing corruption cases against Begoña Gómez, Sánchez’s wife; against David Sánchez, the president’s brother; against José Luis Ávalos, who was Sánchez’s right-hand man in the government and the PSOE; and against the Attorney General for a leak.
After several days of leaks and scandal over what has been revealed—practices typical of the Camorra or Cosa Nostra—in which the PSOE only decided to open an information file on Leire Díez (who has temporarily taken leave from the socialist party), opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo decided to call this demonstration under the slogan “mafia or democracy” yesterday, Sunday, in Plaza de España, just a few meters from the PSOE headquarters, where Leire Díez routinely entered day after day.
The fact that Pedro Sánchez himself negotiated his investiture as president with another fugitive—Puigdemont—certifies that negotiating shameful concessions with fugitives poses no problem for the current leader of the PSOE.
On the occasion of this new episode, the former general secretary of the Madrid socialists, Tomás Gómez, recalled that when Sánchez was expelled from the PSOE general secretariat—which he would regain months later in a primary election—the current president ended up behind a screen with the ballot box and several supporters… “He is capable of anything,” Gómez stated.
Along the same lines, the socialist president of Castilla La Mancha, García Page, the only socialist figure who today dares to criticize Sánchez’s pacts and his colonization of all institutions, also spoke out strongly. García Page, like Tomás Gómez, was also at that meeting and that controversial vote in Ferraz. It was a televised meeting, although “the episode of the screen is not clearly seen in the broadcast. Perhaps it would have been better if what happened had been clearly seen. That way, no one would be surprised by everything that has come after.”
