Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez will announce on Monday whether he intends to continue as Prime Minister. The announcement comes five days after the Socialist leader posted his cri de coeur (cry of the heart) on social media, saying the ongoing “harassment and intimidation” against him and his wife by his political and media opponents was leading him to I’m thinking about my future. For these purposes, he canceled all his public duties until the end of this week.
At the same time, in recent days, the Spanish judiciary has started a preliminary investigation of the Prime Minister’s wife, Begoña Gómez, who is suspected of a conflict of interest in the awarding of state contracts.
She allegedly had ties to several companies that received public money to help combat the effects of the covid-19 pandemic, El Confidencial reported. The investigation followed a complaint by pressure group Manos Limpias (Clean Hands), a self-styled trade union with far-right links that has a long and well-known history of using the courts to prosecute those it sees as a threat to Spain’s democratic interests.
“Now that we’ve reached this point, I’m quite rightly asking: is it all worth it? Frankly, I don’t know,” the prime minister wrote in his letter. “I have to stop and think about it.”
“We often forget that people stand behind politicians,” wrote the prime minister. “I am not at all ashamed to say that I am a man who loves his wife deeply and who has to live with the helplessness of seeing all the mud thrown at her every day.” The British newspaper The Guardian points out that the use of the term “mud” is still a very polite choice of words. Among the rumors that right-wing and far-right personalities and the media try to spread about Gómez are that she is transsexual, that she is involved in the drug trade in Morocco, and that her family runs prostitution.
Sánchez insisted on his wife’s innocence and openly accused the conservative People’s Party (PP) and the far right of colluding with the hostile media, which is trying to cause his “personal and political collapse” by attacking his wife. Sánchez’s letter – which the prime minister said he wrote alone and without consulting his advisers – was described by his allies as the deeply personal last step of a man fed up with attacks on his wife. These have been increasing in recent years.
