Neither offensively nor defensively. Pedro Sánchez goes to the Senate on the 30th, as requested by the PP within the framework of the investigation commission on the Koldo case, convinced that it is facing a Vietnam: a work session chaired by a PP senator, a format in which its members can interrupt whenever they want, a commission in which the person appearing neither opens nor closes the debate and in which each parliamentary group can intervene for 50 minutes. The scenario could not be more unfavorable, but the President of the Government faces the confident transition of having mitigated the effects of the shock wave that the so-called Ábalos case caused him.
In Moncloa they suspect that the opposition will turn the session of the Upper House into a kind of completely rolled over in which the corruption plot that operated in the Ministry of Transport is mixed, the investigation by magistrate Juan Carlos Peinado into Begoña Gómez, the opening of an oral trial against Pedro Sánchez's brother for having occupied a management position in the Badajoz council and even the summons to the Supreme Court of the attorney general for an alleged crime of revealing secrets, although this last case has nothing to do with the events being investigated. Not in vain, the Senate already expanded the object of the investigation so that it could include everything that the PP, with an absolute majority in the Chamber, wanted or had a “direct or indirect relationship” with the issue of the allocation of masks from the Ministry of Transport.
Even so, in the team of the President of the Government, which is already dedicated to preparing the documentation for the appearance on the 30th, they consider that the wear and tear due to the Ábalos case is already discounted, “despite the fact that the front pages of the right-wing media and television networks insist on programming 24/7 formats in which they only talk about whores, envelopes, cash and an alleged structural corruption in the Government that is false.”
The person who speaks this way is a socialist minister, who also defends that “the judiciary no longer eats up the agenda of the day, despite the alternative reality that some media outlets try to project.” Another member of the Government holds the same opinion, for whom the audiences of TVE's news programs demonstrate this trend. Especially in Madrid, where the format presented by Silvia Intxaurrondo has reached up to 50% of viewers in its usual slot. A fact that has opened a window of hope among the Madrid socialists, who see “Ayuso as more restless than ever” due to the wear and tear caused by her partner's tax fraud and the business with the Quirón clinic, the main contractor of the Community of Madrid.
The damage that Ábalos, Koldo and Santos Cerdán – in prison since last July – have caused, however, to the Executive is an indubitable fact. So much so that in the ranks of the PSOE it is recognized that before the summer the opposition managed to dominate the agenda with this scandal and even fish in its electoral fishing grounds. A trend that, however, since September the Government has managed to truncate with issues such as Gaza or the ultra-right movement of the PP in the face of issues of special social sensitivity such as abortion or immigration. They do not hide, however, that the entry into prison of the former minister and former Secretary of Organization of the PSOE after his last appearance before the Supreme Court would have had an impact like any other neutron bomb on the public conversation and was another hard blow for Sánchez. After all, like Cerdán, the former minister was for years a person of his utmost confidence.
Although the popular accusation requested his imprisonment, the Prosecutor's Office did not do so and, therefore, Ábalos was finally released this week with the same precautionary measures that had already been imposed on him. The former minister had been called to testify before magistrate Leopoldo Puente after a latest report from the UCO on the payments that the PSOE transferred to him in cash for his expenses as party leader and a mismatch between what was declared by the party and its movements. But nothing points, at the moment, either to the illegal financing of the PSOE or to the payment of bonuses with opaque money, despite the fact that these are common expressions in the PP's offensive against the Government.
The reports from the Central Operational Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard have become material of wear and tear against the Government, especially those revealed by the audios recorded by Koldo García about the distribution of money from the alleged bribes; the latest deliveries have not contributed much more to the investigation. And neither do the serials on some websites and television programs about prostitution catalogues, statements by former misses about their relationship with Ábalos, testimonies from domestic service personnel or interviews with ex-wives.
Regarding the PSOE's cash payments to Ábalos and Koldo for expenses that the party claims were duly justified, the party managers will have to give an account in the Senate before Sánchez's appearance. But, although the photographs of the envelopes with the PSOE logo and the cash that appear in the latest UCO report invite us to think about a lack of control over the party's accounts, the truth is that there are several State institutions, including the Senate, that work with this primitive system instead of the usual bank transfers.
Feijóo, after a year and a half of hesitations, has decided to use this latest revelation from the UCO as his last bullet against Sánchez and call him to appear in the Senate, as if this payment formula were irrefutable proof of a clear crime of illegal financing about which the investigators have not yet said a single word.
The decision of the president of the PP coincides with the rise of Vox in the polls at the cost of a notable decline in Feijóo's and with the doubts that his strategy and his leadership once again raise among his own barons, as well as among some of his main media references. A circumstance that has not gone unnoticed in the Government, where they insist that despite the efforts of the right “to make citizens believe that we live surrounded by corruption, the truth is that that of Ábalos/Cerdán/Koldo is a very serious case, but encapsulated and of low intensity. Condemnable, without a doubt, but which in no way justifies the hyperbolic accusations of the right, among other issues because as soon as it became known “After the first information, the PSOE acted immediately and expelled those investigated from the party.”
Be that as it may, Sánchez knows that the right will try to project an image of the president's weakness during his appearance on the 30th and that what he has to do before that appointment is to “study hard and suffer more,” his own cabinet acknowledges. The president is obliged to tell the truth and will not be able to take advantage, like those under investigation, of his right not to testify. Hence, among the documentation that La Moncloa prepares for the session are all the records on the Ábalos case, but also the briefs presented by the defense of his wife and his brother, knowing that they will also be the subject of the appearance. Everything indicates that his answers to the flood of questions he faces will have a legal nature, beyond the narrative he intends to install and which, obviously, Moncloa avoids revealing in detail.
What is known is that Sánchez knows the subject in depth, beyond the sheets that his team is preparing for the answers. “We seek to structure the conversation so that data can be distinguished from the noise and mud of reality,” explains a member of the presidential cabinet, who predicts that after Sánchez's appearance there will also be a distinction between the institutional responsibility of a Prime Minister and “the bulldogs that the PP has as senators” and who have made the Senate, and especially the commission on the Koldo case, “a dirty space in which The conversation is impossible and the person appearing is interrupted with bad manners.”