The deadline has expired. This afternoon, former Minister José Luis Ábalos has exhausted the deadline of the ultimatum agreed the day before by the Ferraz executive, without having communicated his resignation from the record of deputy in Congress.
Waiting for Ábalos himself to announce his final decision, the former minister remains a mystery, after having staged an unusual challenge to Pedro Sánchez, which on the political level has only served to question the authority of the president of the Government and general secretary of the PSOE, in addition to supplying high-caliber ammunition to the offensive of the Popular Party after revalidating its absolute majority in Galicia, and while the course of the legislature remains at risk due to the blocking of the Amnesty law and the first general budgets of the mandate remain in the air.
The organizational secretary of the PSOE, Santos Cerdán, explained that this morning he contacted Ábalos, and that he only conveyed his intention to issue a statement with his final decision.
At first, when the murky scandal of alleged corruption was revealed last week for which Koldo García was arrested and is being investigated, who was Ábalos’s personal assistant while he was Minister of Transport and organizational secretary of the PSOE until his abrupt dismissal in July 2021, Sánchez himself refused to take action against whoever was his strong man in the Executive and in Ferraz after winning the 2017 primaries again. “What are we going to do, kick him out of Spain?”, they alleged around the president. , since Ábalos did not appear in the judicial investigation or in the indictment of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office.
This position, however, changed drastically in just 24 hours. The first vice president of the Government and deputy general secretary of the PSOE, María Jesús Montero, already showed Ábalos the exit door last Friday, by implicitly demanding that he resign from her seat: “I know what I would do,” she warned. And on Saturday it was Pedro Sánchez himself who directly put pressure on the former minister: “The fight against corruption has to be relentless, no matter where it comes from and whoever falls.”
But Ábalos, who refused to succumb to the PP offensive, resisted giving up his seat, distancing himself from the alleged corrupt practices of whoever was his personal assistant. The negotiations to find a solution to the conflict, led by the organization secretary of the PSOE, Santos Cerdán, did not bear fruit either. And last Sunday the formula was agreed upon to try to get the former minister to renounce his membership as a deputy. The socialist federal executive, meeting on Monday in Ferraz, unanimously agreed to claim Ábalos’ seat, to assume political responsibility for the Koldo case even though he was not charged, and granted him a period of 24 hours to act accordingly. This agreement allowed the PSOE leadership to take measures against the former minister, in the event that he chose not to hand in his deputy’s certificate within the deadline of this Tuesday at noon.
Ábalos’s first reaction after receiving the ultimatum from the PSOE executive on Monday, four hours after it was communicated to him, was to register his resignation as president of the Congressional Interior Commission, a compensation that the socialist group granted him. in this legislature for having been a minister, without resigning his seat in the meantime. This Tuesday morning, Ferraz’s organizational secretary, Santos Cerdán, contacted Ábalos again, and the former minister only announced his intention to issue a statement with his final decision.
