“If a deputy has his wife in a court, you have to ask for the minutes, be it on the party.” Last Wednesday, before the press and in the Congress of Deputies, Alberto Núñez Feijóo commented on the last movement of Judge Juan Carlos Peinado, who has taught Begoña Gómez the way to a jury court, and established a new ribbon in politics: if a politician has a relative “in a court”, he must resign. “How many democratic governments would support having a direct relative of the president on the bench?” A ribbon that, today, fails to cross some of the visible faces of their party with direct relatives pending or already sentence.
The consequences that the imputation of a relative must have for an active public representative is a debate that has exceeded Spanish politics for decades. Since Alfonso Guerra, vice president of the Government with the PSOE of Felipe González who left the Executive in 1991 in full investigation to his brother Juan, different cases have passed over and below the radar until, in the last year, the open causes against the wife and brother of the government president have turned the imputation of relatives in the cause of resignation request for a politician.
Various positions and leaders of the Popular Party are in that exact situation described by Feijóo a few days ago from the guts of the Congress of Deputies without the formation having urged some kind of step back for them. The clearest example is the president of the Community of Madrid. Isabel Díaz Ayuso's couple, Alberto González Amador, is waiting to be tried for defrauding 350,000 euros using false invoices, in addition to investigated in a second cause for possible corruption in their businesses with the Quirón health giant.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo's party has fully backed the regional president both when ensuring that her partner is a “private citizen” and when Ayuso denounced to be a victim of a conspiracy of the State's apparatus. Feijóo came to say that it was something “absolutely macho” to try to hold the leader of the Madrid PP for the legal problems of her partner. A spokesman for the Ayuso government asked this week expressly about Feijóo's words and replied that they did not “by alludes.”
The party has only stepped on the brake when the environment of the regional president, through his chief of cabinet Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, has directed his bullets against the magistrate who has opened an oral trial against him. “There is no lawfare,” his spokesman Esther Muñoz said a few days when he saw that Rodriguez's judicial discourse approached his socialist rivals. The difference between Alberto González Amador and Begoña Gómez, according to Feijóo, is that the first is not “a public office.”
There was also no internal swell in the Popular Party when Eldiario.es unveiled exclusively that the National Court accused the husband of Ángeles Muñoz, mayor of Marbella and senator for the PP, of being part of a criminal organization dedicated to drug trafficking. Lars Gunnar Broberg died in 2023 but his son, and Daughters of Muñoz, was tried last summer and is waiting for a sentence. Muñoz, once the case revealed, repeated as a candidate for mayor of this town from Malaga. “I know that until today there is no imputation towards the mayor or to any member of the Municipal Corporation,” said the Andalusian president. The National PP also came out in its defense.
The red line that Alberto Núñez Feijóo has now marked with accused relatives was also not applicable, this time by the PSOE, when the magnifying glass of justice perched on members of the royal family and direct family members, therefore, of the current monarch Felipe VI. Neither when his sister Cristina de Borbón was sentenced as a lucrative party in the Nóos case or when, in that same case, her brother -in -law Iñaki Urdangarin had to enter prison to serve her sentence of more than five years of prison.
Nor when the Prosecutor's Office investigated his father for more than a year, Juan Carlos I, to conclude that the management of his fortune had been potentially criminal even if it was the extent of the courts by prescription and immunity.
From Cantabria to the Civil Guard
Politicians of one political sign have relatives under investigation in the courts, some of them even convicted and others waiting for trial. The National Police arrested a relative of the mayor of the Cantabrian town of Santa Cruz de Bezana (PP) accused of participating in an explosive attack on a headquarters of the PSOE in the region without his resignation being on the table.
The Popular Party has not demanded the resignation of charges when they were charged themselves or a court or court had urged an investigation against them. He did not do so when in 2018 a judge of Plaza de Castilla requested, without success, that the Supreme Court imputed to Pablo Casado to obtain his master supposedly irregular. Nor when another judge, is from Navalcarnero, asked the courts to investigate Ana Millán, regional deputy and close collaborator of Isabel Díaz Ayuso, for alleged corruption in her stage as a local policy in Arroyomolinos. That case is still pending investigation in the court.
Without leaving Arroyomolinos, another magistrate has prosecuted the current mayor of the town for the Popular Party, this time accused of skipping the internal procedures of a municipal company to appoint several people. The PSOE has requested, without success at the moment, the resignation of Ana Millán's successor in the town hall of this town of 37,000 inhabitants of Madrid.
The most recent newspaper library leaves a resignation of a relevant public office for a judicial investigation that fenced a direct relative. María Gámez, director of the Civil Guard from 2020 to 2023, left her position at the head of the Armed Institute when her husband was charged in one of the multiple ramifications in the case of the ERE of Andalusia. A year and a few months later, the Court of Seville in charge of the case exonerated Gámez's husband, who expressed his opinion in a Post on Facebook: “The damage will never have possible repair.”