Activist Judges Want to Oust Spain’s Broad-Left Government
Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez may resign after a judge launched a bogus corruption probe targeting his wife, Begoña Gómez. The case is a farce pushed by far-right lobbyists that shows the need to rein in Spain’s politicized judiciary.
Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez speaks to his supporters, alongside his wife, Begoña Gómez, on November 11, 2019. (Burak Akbulut / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Pedro Sánchez is not known for showing emotion. The Spanish prime minister’s ice-cold pragmatism and tactical brilliance have seen him outmaneuver the Spanish right, as well as rivals on his left flank, time and again since he became prime minister in 2018. Yet things changed on Wednesday night, as a Madrid judge accepted the petition from a far-right organization to open a political corruption and graft investigation into his wife, Begoña Gómez. Sánchez released a highly charged public letter in which he announced that he was considering resigning.
Leader of the center-left Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), he also canceled all his public engagements until Monday, when he will announce his decision on whether to continue. “I am a man who is deeply in love with his wife but who is powerless before the dirt and smears that are being thrown at her day after day,” Sánchez wrote. “I need to stop and reflect. I urgently need to answer the question of whether it is worth [continuing].” He also insisted that behind this campaign of harassment was the fact that the Spanish right and far right “have not accepted the election results” of last July.
This is in many ways nothing new: lawfare has, after all, been a major issue for Sánchez’s left-leaning coalition since it took office in 2020. Ever since, reactionary elements in the upper echelons of the justice system have operated as an undemocratic parallel power, aiming to discipline and undermine what they see as an “illegitimate” government. The current judicial offensive has been unrelenting since last November when Sánchez’s PSOE finalized a parliamentary alliance with Catalan nationalist parties in exchange for an amnesty law for those involved in the failed 2017 independence push.
The proposed amnesty was denounced in polemical terms by the country’s largest association of judges as “the beginning of the end of democracy” in Spain. The right-wing-dominated General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) characterized it as involving the “erosion, if not the abolition, of the rule of law.” At the same time, a series of terrorism investigations were suddenly taken up by the courts against Catalan politicians, journalists, and activists, in an apparent attempt to undermine the amnesty and destabilize the government’s fragile parliamentary majority.
This is the context in which we ought to understand the judicial investigation into Gómez’s very limited professional dealings with an airline that, like the whole aviation sector during the pandemic, received a government bailout. The case against her was brought by the notorious far-right group Manos Limpias (“Clean Hands,” named after the Italian trials of the early 1990s), a self-styled “anti-corruption” organization that specializes in bringing spurious lawsuits against progressive targets such as Podemos. Yet its submitted report lacks any material evidence of Gómez’s trafficking of favors. According to the group itself, its case is based “solely“ on a series of claims published in the right-wing press.
As the legal correspondent for Investigate Europe, Manuel Rico, notes, “the real scandal” is that a judge would “accept a petition” to open a criminal investigation on such a basis — something Rico characterizes as “[legally] irregular” and “incomprehensible.” Yet far from being an isolated case, the judicial harassment of Gómez can only be understood in terms of the wider interventionist campaign that reactionary judges have waged so as to frustrate the agenda of Europe’s most left-leaning government.
Judges Against Democracy
Indeed, it is no accident that off the record, one leading figure in PSOE has been heard calling Supreme Court judge Manuel Marchena “the real leader of the opposition.” “In Spain there is a problem with the separation of powers,” wrote El Diario editor-in-chief Ignacio Escolar in 2021. “But it is not the government that is overstepping the powers assigned to it but the judiciary. The latter is seeking to exercise functions that are not its own and engaging in politics. . . . For quite a while the political right has been acting in coordination with the right-wing of the judiciary.”
During the previous PSOE–Unidas Podemos coalition government from 2020–2023, such coordination was most evident in a whole series of bogus criminal investigations involving senior ministers. Public prosecutors, judges, and police repeatedly colluded to undermine the authority of the elected government. The 2020 investigation into PSOE interior minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska ended with senior policing figures within the Guardia Civil (including the commanding officer in the Madrid region) being removed from their posts for faking a key report. Former deputy prime minister Pablo Iglesias was also subjected to months of judicial investigations and a media frenzy over baseless claims that he faked the theft of his assistant’s mobile (which had in fact been snatched by a corrupt police officer who was spying on him and Podemos).
Others that were targeted included former foreign minister Arancha González Laya. She was indicted for malfeasance and falsifying documents in relation to the entry into Spain for medical aid of the leader of the Polisario Front — the national liberation movement of Western Sahara. Former equality minister Irene Montero was investigated for supposedly using her governmental advisor as a nanny (the main evidence for this was a short video in which the advisor happened to be holding the child).
None of the investigations went to trial. But the fact that some of Spain’s top judges were willing to open cases into government officials on the flimsiest of bases ensured that Sánchez’s team was bogged down in pointless controversy for months at a time — and created an atmosphere that the conservative Partido Popular and extreme-right Vox could exploit. As Íñigo Errejón, an MP for left-wing alliance Sumar, has argued, Sánchez’s move this week is not just about one political leader but about the fact that “the right make it impossible for the Left to govern in this country under normal conditions. . . .The political right and the reactionary state apparatuses use their considerable institutional power to create an unsustainable situation [for the government].”
The Right on the Offensive
The current judicial offensive, of which the Gómez case forms a part, can be traced back to the call to arms issued by right-wing figurehead José María Aznar last November, as the new left-leaning coalition between PSOE and Sumar was about to take office. “Pedro Sánchez is a danger to Spain,” insisted former prime minister Aznar, as it became clear that the PSOE and the Catalan parties’ amnesty negotiations were nearing an agreement. “We are facing an unprecedented constitutional crisis,” he continued. “Whoever can do something, should do it, and whoever can contribute, should contribute. There is no room for inhibition.”
As police unions, public prosecutors, and judges’ associations mobilized against the amnesty in the subsequent days, using language indistinguishable from Partido Popular talking points, far-right protesters also took to the streets, laying siege to PSOE headquarters on consecutive nights for over a month in protests that were marked by repeated violent clashes and the display of openly fascist symbols. Errejón wrote in El Diario that this was not so much an orchestrated plan as “a [political and social] bloc moving organically rather than mechanically — with internal frictions and contradictions, with more extremist sectors and others more cautious . . . but each moving in a shared direction. . . . [The aim is] to encircle the still unborn government, to leave it a hostage from the beginning, on the defensive, with its room for maneuver limited.”
In the wake of the investiture, the Right has pursued two lines of attack in the courts. The first has been to undermine the potential effectiveness of the amnesty legislation, in order to make it impossible to implement. In this respect, as the deadline approached for the Spanish government and pro-independence parties to reach an agreement on the final text of the law in early March, the country’s Supreme Court moved to indict former Catalan premier Carles Puigdemont as a formal suspect in a terrorism case.
Puigdemont’s indictment relates to his supposed coordinating role in the mass occupation of Barcelona airport in 2019 by thousands of pro-independence activists, a protest that the Supreme Court argues meets the criteria for “low-intensity terrorism.” Incredibly, the Court justified this on the basis that protesters “used dangerous instruments and objects of similar destructive power to explosives, such as fire extinguishers, glass and aluminum sheets, fences, metal carts or luggage racks.” This is an interpretation that an El País editorial described as “at the very least, polemical” and “provoking profound legal uncertainty.”
As terrorism is one of the few criminal offenses not covered under the proposed amnesty legislation, Puigdemont’s indictment complicates his and other Catalan exiles’ return home when the law finally comes into effect this summer. Even as amnesty negotiations have been ongoing, journalist Jesús Rodríguez and three pro-independence activists have also been forced into exile as reactionary judge Manuel García-Castellón indicted them before the Audiencia Nacional in a connected terrorism case.
This, however, has been combined by a second line of attack: namely, to try to replicate the type of legal maneuver that brought down center-left Portuguese prime minister António Costa last year. Many on the Spanish left were surprised at the speed at which Costa stood down, particularly after it was revealed in the wake of his resignation that he had been wrongly named as a suspect — with the prosecutors’ documents referring to the economy minister, who had nearly the same name as his. A recent genuine corruption scandal in the PSOE, relating to pandemic-era contracts, could not be traced back to Sánchez. But in the media storm that raged around it, unsubstantiated stories around his wife provided the opportunity the Right was looking for.
The news reports around Gómez have focused on a proposed €40,000/year sponsorship deal between the research center she headed at IE University and the airline Air Europa, which ended up not going ahead due to the pandemic. In reality, the sum total of what IE actually received from Air Europa from the proposed sponsorship deal seems to have amounted to four airline tickets. Yet this was enough for the right-wing press to generate weeks of headlines on the supposed lavish favors Gómez had received from executives that, in turn, led to the Manos Limpias lawsuit.
One of the press stories at the heart of the Manos Limpias case has already been retracted after it was revealed that alleged public funding Gómez had also supposedly received, and which the government was meant to have covered up, was in fact a grant paid to someone else with the same name as the prime minister’s wife. Yet even so, the judge, whose daughter is a Partido Popular city councilor, accepted this as part of the basis for opening a criminal investigation.
Where Next?
Now, in the face of the Right’s media and judicial offensive, Sánchez must decide on his next move — with many commentators seeing his open letter as an attempt to mobilize progressive Spanish society behind him as he seeks to regain the political initiative from conservative forces. Journalist Daniel Bernabe interprets Sánchez’s underlying message to progressives as: “If I am left alone to face this [onslaught], I’m standing down but if I feel there is a collective reflection and an outpouring of support, I will continue.”
Demonstrations in support of the prime minister are now planned for the weekend, with even those to his Left now framing a defense of the PSOE leader as bound up with the fate of the progressive government and Spanish democracy more generally. After months on the defensive, the progressive side of Spanish politics seems energized by Sánchez’s latest dramatic maneuver, but one that once again leaves his radical left coalition partner Sumar marginalized on the national scene.
There has been speculation linking him to a post in the European Union. But many leaders of his party believe he can be convinced to stay. One PSOE official told me, “Sánchez is a political animal, a killer. There is no chance he is going.” Yet if he does stay, he must finally confront the right wing’s undue hold on the courts more directly. For all his audacity as a political operator, Sánchez has been very cautious when it comes to confronting the country’s politicized judiciary.
In particular, the government must prioritize a rule change for the renewal of the General Council of the Judiciary. It is the state body that controls all appointments to the Supreme Court and Audiencia Nacional and has had an artificial conservative majority since its current mandate expired in December 2018. This has been the result of the Partido Popular blocking its usual replacement, in a tactic taken straight from US Republican playbook. Up until now, the PSOE has remained wedded to the old rules of the game and cross-party consensus, but a radicalized right (both in the parliament and the courts) simply sees this as a weakness to be exploited. This must now change.