It didn’t take a minute. The appearance of Pedro Sánchez at the It became from the first moment a pitched battle in which the opposition senators tried to corner the president with the , with the Ábalos case, with his closeness to his two former Organization secretaries involved in the case, while Sánchez became increasingly indignant. Until, after the first half hour, Sánchez, visibly upset, had enough: “This is a defamation commission.” “This is a circus!”
The tension had already been seen from the first moment, even with the president of the commission, Eloy Suárez, of the PP, whom Sánchez accused of being biased. The fight was especially hard on him, who accused the president of using the ploy of answering at length to run out of time. Suárez openly confronted Sánchez several times for saying “defamation commission” and, also very angry, stated: “those words will be removed from the session journal due to the lack of respect they represent for this House.”
The session ran between maximum tension between Sánchez and the opposition senators and hilarious moments, because the leader of the PSOE decided to take some interventions as a joke and use sarcasm. “Go away, Mr. Sánchez,” UPN senator María Caballero snapped at him in the first intervention, asking him to resign. “I have to respond to several groups here in the Senate before I leave, Madam Knight, but I have no problem [en irme]”Sanchez replied with a smile.
“Who was in the Peugeot?” she asked him to clarify his Cerdán and Koldo García, who accompanied him on his trips in the 2017 PSOE primary campaign.
—Are you seriously asking me this? “Well, it depends on the day,” Sánchez laughed.
“Does this seem like a joke?” she was indignant.
—It seems like a waste of time to me. If you only have this to ask…
The commission went on like this, without anyone managing to throw a final blow at Sánchez, who started out very annoyed, trying to lengthen his answers to save time while the senators interrupted him to force him to answer, but little by little he relaxed when he realized that no one was in a position to force him to go to any terrain that he did not control.
Sánchez only seemed really uncomfortable when he talked about those that affect him directly. They asked him several times and he admitted that he received cash payments in the past, although at no time did they exceed 1,000 euros, the maximum amount allowed by law for such payments. He did not want to give many details, he said that they were “anecdotal amounts” and in any case all of them with proof of each expense and output from the party’s official accounts.
The president tried to use all his turns to attack the PP, although the senators stopped him from doing so. The president, clearly on the offensive from the first moment, defended the PSOE’s accounts and its behavior with salaries and expenses. “In the PSOE there are no bonuses, unlike in other parties. What’s more, we contribute the positions to the organization, it is others who have black money,” he said on one occasion. “There have been senators here who had a million euros in a bag at home,” said Francisco Granados, former vice president of the Community of Madrid with the PP and former senator.
The most difficult moments, in which Sánchez changed his tone and became serious, came when a senator raised questions with him, with conversations in which they treated women like cattle. There he had a difficult way out, and Sánchez admitted the blow, although he insisted that never, during the years in which they worked side by side and traveled throughout the country, did he see any suspicious behavior from Ábalos. A part that the opposition senators considered impossible to believe: “Ábalos was a person of my utmost trust, it is true. The political qualities he has are clear, politically he was a solid person, but I was unaware of his habits and his daily life. This is a Government absolutely committed to feminism, to women,” Sánchez said in response to the rumors and some laughter from the senators. “These recordings that we have seen disgust me, I absolutely reject them. We have changed the PSOE code of conduct to expel anyone who uses prostitution,” he tried to defend himself.
Sánchez maintains his official version, that is, that he did not fire Ábalos for his personal behavior, but because the Executive needed a renewal after the pandemic. In the PSOE, however, the idea has been established that he was fired because they told him things about his disorderly life, but not because of suspicions of corruption, because otherwise he would never have been allowed to repeat on the Congress lists.
Another tense moment was when another very delicate matter arose, the accusations from the opposition that Sánchez “benefited from prostitution” due to the gay saunas that his father-in-law owned. The president has never entered into this matter, and this time he did so in a very collateral way to deny the main accusation. Vox senator Ángel Pelayo Gordillo asked him if he paid for his 2017 primary campaign with money from his father-in-law’s “prostitution businesses.” Sánchez was outraged, but as soon as he got into the matter: “leaving aside the adjectives used against my father-in-law, now deceased, I am going to answer: of course not.”
The commission advanced with an increasingly comfortable president, at times mocking, amusing his senators, who breathed even more when the groups that support the Government arrived. And he only became serious again when talking about his wife, Begoña Gómez. First because of the hoaxes that try to say that she is transsexual, something that Carla Antonelli, from Más Madrid, reminded her that she is, and she was outraged because they say it as if it were something negative. “My wife’s accusation of transsexuality is being prosecuted,” Sánchez recalled. “Macron’s wife is also accused of being transsexual as if it were pejorative. Obama’s wife was also accused. The extreme right does this all over the world. It is about attacking personally, and what a coincidence, always women,” he concluded.
Sánchez defended his family again and again, and complained that Villarejo even investigated his daughters. “Of course my wife has nothing to do with the rescue of Air Europa, this was also said by the UCO reports, but when some do not say what they like they do not mention them, when other times they seem like the Bible to them,” he said. Sánchez also took the opportunity to attack Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the president of the Community of Madrid, in her desire to compare the reaction of the PP and the PSOE to corruption. “What would some say about me if my administration had given a million and a half euros in a contract and my brother had received 280,000 euros as a commission? What would they say if the president of my party had denounced this and had been fired for doing so? I sell advice and for me I don’t have any, this is the issue,” he concluded. As the commission progressed, Sánchez went more and more clearly on the attack. “Telemadrid is part of the mud machine that the PP has launched,” he stated while the popular senators were outraged. “When Casado denounced corruption, they fired him to replace the drug trafficker’s friend, Alberto Núñez Feijóo,” he said at another time.
The long session also served to verify that the partners maintain their support for Sánchez after the corruption scandals of his two former organization secretaries. The big exception was Junts, which has broken with the PSOE and had to show it. His senator, Eduard Pujol, had a harsh tone that Sánchez avoided entering. “Beyond the decision [de romper] which I respect, we are going to continue trying to reach agreements with you,” Sánchez turned the other cheek. He even reminded him that although Puigdemont still does not have the amnesty, many other “second and third level” positions in Junts have already benefited.
The commission, which was designed to corner Sánchez, has little by little become a scenario dominated by the president himself to counterattack the PP, launch himself against far-right groups that persecute him such as Clean Hands, and complain about the harassment of his family: “The Civil Guard made a report about my wife and there she is exonerated of any responsibility. Many red lines have been crossed in the personal attack,” he has gone so far as to say.
Sánchez was already very relaxed when the decisive moment arrived, that of the PP senator, Alejo Miranda de Larra. It was the last chance for the president not to leave the commission alive, and Miranda did the rest. He went to the knife from the first second, demanding that Sánchez answer yes or no, interrupting him, asking him to “tell some truth.” The fight was enormous, with enormous tension, but Sánchez had planned for a moment like this and maintained a calm tone at all times, and brought up all the corruption cases of the PP and even Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s partner. “The so-called Alberto Quirón achieved a commission of two million euros with two calls and an email,” he even launched. “This is an inquisitorial commission, from Torquemada.” “Today he comes here feeling offended, he has very thin skin,” Miranda snapped. “You are ashamed of your brother because he paid taxes in Portugal,” he also said. Sánchez took the interrogation more and more as a joke. “But what are you telling me?”, he came to confront him, in a commission that sometimes got completely out of hand and had almost tabernacle moments.
Despite the obvious tension and the PP’s attempt to dislodge him, after almost five hours of commission, Sánchez was already very relaxed. “Based on how this commission is going, I am delighted to be here,” he mocked. “If you have all the techniques to tell the truth, you know them all,” Miranda complained, increasingly desperate because time was running out and Sánchez kept intact the wall he had prepared in his strategy. The senator tried to get the president of the commission to help him by cutting Sánchez off, but the latter constantly asked his colleague to let the president finish. Miranda tried everything. “I withdraw the question,” he said constantly to move on to the next one. “Come on, come on, answer,” he snapped at the president. But it was useless. Sánchez maintained the tone and made fun of him. “I understand that you have to give credit, but the person who portrays all of this is you.”
The commission, which was seen in the previous days in the Government as a great risk, thus turned out much better than expected by the strategists of La Moncloa who prepared it thoroughly, as could be seen in the number of papers that the president handled at all times, who read them by putting on and taking off glasses that he does not usually wear in public. The PP delayed this moment of calling Sánchez for more than a year, precisely because they thought there was a risk that he would come out of it alive. Now the popular people will have the possibility of calling Sánchez back to the Senate whenever they want. But after the result, they will probably think about it a lot again.
