Sánchez corruption scandals are a godsend for Spanish far right

Corruption scandals rocking Spain’s governing Socialist Party spell trouble for Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez — but they’re being celebrated by the country’s far-right Vox party.

The ultranationalist group, which campaigns on the principle that Spain’s democratic system is rotten, on Thursday said it was vindicated by news reports revealing that that organized crime investigators had evidence connecting the Socialist Party’s third-highest ranking member, Santos Cerdán, with taking kickbacks.

As right-wing parties have surged in elections around Europe — from Romania to Portugal to Poland — Vox has been consistently rising in Spanish polls since last fall, attracting particular support among potential voters aged 18 to 44. It grabbed the opportunity to hammer Sánchez and his socialists.

“I’ve spent the past seven years denouncing this gang of delinquents,” Vox leader Santiago Abascal said in a video.

“And I’ve done it alone, while others made deals with the Socialist Party in Brussels,” he added, in a broadside against Spain’s center-right People’s Party (PP) and its EU parent group, the European People’s Party, which Abascal routinely criticizes for voting with the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) group in the European Parliament.

“The government is a pool of corruption, a stinking swamp, a mafia group, a gang of criminals that only exists to enrich a small group of people and perpetuate their hold on power,” Abascal said, demanding the PP force a no-confidence vote in parliament to topple Sánchez. “I appeal to all the honorable lawmakers, all those who are not corrupt, to back the motion.”

Abascal’s demands put the PP in an awkward spot.

The leading opposition party knows that a no-confidence vote against Sánchez would be doomed to fail because it would require a majority of lawmakers to back an alternative candidate to be prime minister.

Center-right leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo would not only need the support of Vox, but also separatist and regionalist parties which said Thursday they had no interest in handing him the government.

“It’s deluded for anyone to suggest that we could support a vote of no confidence that favors the PP given what that party has done to Catalan in Europe,” said Junts Secretary-General Jordi Turull, referring to the conservative party’s lobbying campaign against the recognition of Catalan as an official EU language.

“I can’t imagine ever teaming up with these people,” he railed.

The PP’s refusal to present a doomed motion against Sánchez allows Abascal, who is also president of the far-right Patriots party at the EU level, to imply that Spain’s mainstream political groups collude with one another.

Pablo Simón, a political scientist at Madrid’s Carlos III University, predicted that Abascal’s far-right party would seize the opportunity to argue that “the PP and the Socialist are two pillars of a single, fundamentally corrupt system.”

“We’ve seen the party benefit greatly from the argument that the political establishment is discredited,” Simón said. “Following the deadly floods in Valencia, Vox rose in the polls by arguing that neither the PP-controlled regional government nor the Socialist national government had been competent enough to handle the crisis.”

Pointing out that the current political drama in Spain is based solely on a preliminary investigative report from the elite Civil Guard’s Central Operative Unit (UCO), Simón said even more problematic scandals were likely to surface in the coming months and further undermine the government.

“Sánchez’s public apology doesn’t solve this problem and certainly won’t allow him to separate his government from the allegations of corruption,” he added. “That may theoretically bring Feijóo closer to taking power, but it also strengthens the far right and makes it all the more likely that the PP will have to depend on Vox to form an eventual government.”