“I had political confidence in Ábalos, but from a personal point of view he was a great stranger to me, I was unaware of these facets of his,” Pedro Sánchez tells Gemma Nierga. It is, of course, a powerful phrase. Sánchez strives to separate the artist from the work, attacking the artist, “a great unknown,” and saying that he trusted the work, which is the reason that has landed Ábalos in jail: the work, the political trust, not “those facets of his.” There are unscrupulous reasons why Pedro Sánchez feels prepared to pronounce that phrase like that. It has to do with the breeding ground that government and party colleagues, grassroots militants and honest journalists have generated around him: everything has been apologized to him, starting with the most Martian thing that he said he would never do (amnesty, pardons, pacts), so why wouldn’t he meet Ábalos now. The uncritical will buy it, those for whom the leader will always be right until the threat of the extreme right disappears. You have to keep quiet so as not to play into their game, you know. They will say that the Peugeot was a blablacar that the others got into (“I’m José Luis, from Valencia”), they shared some jokes, shared the sandwiches and stopped to pee on the industrial estates. Saying “a great unknown to me” about his number 2 is to up the ante of Rajoy’s “that man you are telling me about” about his treasurer, and that Sánchez can pronounce that phrase without a hint of irony implies that the bond of trust between ruler and governed (his own, the adept) is no longer based on truth, but on necessity. It does not matter if it is true that he did not know Ábalos: it matters that we must believe it to avoid something worse. The scenario is interesting because it is serious: politics is no longer discussed in terms of facts, but rather fears. If fear chooses, reality will always be an dispensable detail. And without reality, or with it altered, the least problem the left will have is believing or not that, for Sánchez, Ábalos was a stranger.
