“When someone says they are leaving, it is because they have already left.” This maxim, attributed to Julio Cortázar, was already used in the PSOE when José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero confirmed in April 2011, before the party’s federal committee, that he would not run for re-election as President of the Government. “The best is yet to come,” said Zapatero, after announcing his goodbye.
The same phrase from the Argentine writer was heard again among socialist leaders when Zapatero’s successor at the head of the PSOE, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, announced that he was leaving his seat in Congress, in June 2014, and was beginning to withdraw from politics to return. to civilian life. “It was worth it,” Rubalcaba certified in his farewell. The veteran socialist leader and former vice president of the government, who died unexpectedly in 2019, thus seemed to respond, ten years in advance, to the same question that his successor in the leadership of the PSOE, Pedro Sánchez, is now asking.
But that Sánchez has actually left is what some of his faithful suspected early on, still stupefied, while last Wednesday they read with wide eyes the surprising letter to the citizens that the President of the Government published on his social networks. .
“I need to stop and reflect. I urgently need to answer the question of whether it is worth it, despite the mud into which the right and the extreme right try to turn politics. “If I should continue at the head of the Government or give up this high honor,” Sánchez announced in his letter.
Some of his intimates no longer saw a possible turning back, and interpreted that the head of the Executive was going to take the step of resigning: “Other things are difficult to explain,” they assumed. The die, their team lamented, was cast.
With the “harassment and demolition operation” against the president’s wife, Begoña Gómez, as the last straw that broke the camel’s back of patience in the marriage. Until now, Sánchez himself bitterly reproached the ordeal that they claimed his wife was suffering, whom they saw defenseless in the face of the campaign of political destruction that, in the opinion of the socialists, is being orchestrated by the leader of the Popular Party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo. As the PP government began to promote ten years ago, as soon as Sánchez won the leadership of the PSOE for the first time, through the then commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, according to new information revealed last Saturday by La Vanguardia.
Sánchez prescribed resignation to his wife on numerous occasions, after having been accused of nonsense such as that he is actually a transsexual, or that he worked for a Moroccan drug trafficking mafia. The President of the Government, throughout his eventful political career, ended up covered in a layer of reinforced concrete in the face of the permanent attack from the right, and even from his own ranks, to overthrow him. “He can do everything, but the fact that they attack his wife and his daughters is beyond him,” he alleged in his closest circle. And the last complaint by the ultra pseudo-union Clean Hands against Begoña Gómez for the alleged crimes of influence peddling and corruption in business, in response to which the head of the investigating court number 41 of Madrid opened proceedings, would have been just the last straw that broke the case. a glass of patience already saturated.
After five days of absolute uncertainty, which Sánchez demanded last Wednesday to “be able to reflect and decide which path to take,” the President of the Government plans to appear this morning to announce his final decision. In a climate of absolute uncertainty, in the Government, in the PSOE and in all political areas of Spain. And also in Catalonia, now in the middle of the electoral campaign ahead of the polls on May 12. “No news,” they continued to claim last night in Moncloa.
After the PSOE federal committee last Saturday, which launched a unanimous cry of support for Sánchez so that he does not resign, amplified by the concentration of thousands of militants and sympathizers at the doors of Ferraz, yesterday there continued to be signs of support among the leadership and socialist militancy, and other progressive voices. Almost desperately, given the widespread impression that the head of the Executive already made the decision to resign last Wednesday.
“Sánchez is the fucking master,” encouraged the Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, yesterday at the extraordinary congress of the PSdeG. The socialist leader wondered if Feijóo will not have in his possession “the papers of the espionage of Pedro Sánchez’s father-in-law from 2014” that the PP government with Mariano Rajoy at the helm ordered, according to this newspaper. “I find it hard to believe that the presidents of the PP do not pass the papers to each other,” Puente warned. “Knowing Feijóo, I don’t believe that he has stepped aside on this issue. What’s more, I am one of those who believes, firmly, and we await an explanation from Feijóo, who today is behind the strategy of undermining the personal and family life of Pedro Sánchez because politically they cannot handle him,” he denounced.
The leader of Más Madrid and Minister of Health, Mónica García, who assured that she has “intuitions” regarding Sánchez’s possible resignation, but refused to make “lucubrations”, also conveyed her support to the president. And she called to put up a wall in the face of the “political bullying” of the right against the progressive forces, which in her opinion is, in short, “harassment of democracy.” “They will neither break us nor, of course, tame us,” she warned.
