Until late last year, Spain’s right-wing Vox could claim a rare distinction: being the only major party in the country without a corruption allegation to its name. That changed in December when the ruling Socialists, led by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, filed a complaint accusing Vox of illegal financing.
The Socialists allege that Vox has collected up to €5 million through donation boxes and merchandise sales at street stands, both of which would violate political funding regulations. Sánchez’s party has also pointed to a €6.5 million loan allegedly given to Vox by a Hungarian bank linked to the country’s right-wing prime minister, Viktor Orbán. On March 10, Spain’s anti-corruption prosecutor (surely the country’s busiest institution) opened an investigation into Vox based on the Socialists’ complaint.
One wonders how much time and money the Socialists spent probing Vox’s finances. Such investigations are usually handled by the police or judiciary, rather than politicians—but not in Spain, where corruption allegations are a valuable political currency. The country’s three major parties—the Socialists, the Conservative People’s Party (PP), and Vox—spend more time accusing each other of corruption than debating policy. Ultimately, it’s a game in which everyone loses.
Vox’s parliamentary spokesperson, Pepa Millán, claims that the Socialists are “surrounded by corruption” and are trying to divert attention from their own alleged misdemeanors. She refers to the Koldo case, named after Koldo García Izaguirre, a former advisor to the government’s ex-Transport Minister, José Luis Ábalos. During the pandemic, Izaguirre allegedly took illegal commissions on contracts awarded to public companies for face mask production. (Ábalos maintains his innocence but was expelled from the Socialist Party.)
Millán’s words echo those of the former Conservative leader Mariano Rajoy, who in June 2018 was the first Spanish prime minister to be ousted by a no-confidence vote. The motion was tabled and won by Sánchez after the PP was found guilty in Spain’s largest-ever corruption probe. In the so-called Gürtel case, 29 defendants, many of them senior PP officials, were convicted of crimes such as influence-peddling, embezzlement, bribery, and money-laundering. The party’s former treasurer, Luis Bárcenas, was sentenced to 33 years in jail. An indignant Sánchez accused Rajoy of introducing the “chronic illness” of corruption into Spanish society—a remark that backfired. “Are you [Mother] Teresa of Calcutta?” Rajoy retorted: “There is corruption everywhere, as you well know because you’re near it.”
It was a classic example of how, in Spain, corruption allegations often boomerang back to the accuser. Rajoy was alluding to the ERE scandal, involving Socialist politicians in the southern region of Andalusia. Prosecutors in the ERE case argued that, between 2001 and 2010, two successive Socialist administrations channeled €680 million intended for unemployment benefits and struggling companies to individuals and corporations close to the party. Nineteen former Socialist officials were found guilty of misconduct, misuse of public funds, or both. Among them were two Andalusian presidents, including José Antonio Griñán, who was sentenced to six years in prison. Though the ERE scandal predated Sánchez’s leadership of the Socialist Party, which began in 2014, it still damaged the credibility of his anti-corruption stance.
When the ERE verdicts were handed out in November 2019, the center-left newspaper El País ran an article comparing the case with Gürtel. It concluded that ERE was the lesser of the two scandals because none of the major players had personally enriched themselves, and only €680 million of public money had been squandered, not the “billions” claimed by the Spanish right. But another takeaway from the article was clear: that the only real debate concerns the extent to which Spain’s main parties are corrupt. Corruption itself is a given.
Politicians’ families are also vulnerable to attack. Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the Conservative president of Madrid, claimed last March that her romantic partner, Alberto González Amador, had been “besieged” by the government when it emerged that he was under investigation for tax fraud. Ayuso alleged that the accusations were an attempt to force her out, which was not implausible. Sánchez’s life would be much easier if she didn’t control the capital. Since taking office in 2019, Ayuso has become the prime minister’s most fierce critic. She has been re-elected twice on a free-market, libertarian platform and was the only politician to challenge Sánchez’s lockdown policies during the pandemic.
Sánchez called upon the PP’s national leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, to dismiss Ayuso “in order to start being a little more credible in your fight against corruption.” (Feijóo refused, reminding Sánchez that his own government was also under investigation.) Ayuso claimed, like Vox is doing now, that the allegations were a distraction from Koldo. “The most suspicious thing, the most murky thing,” she said, “is to see all the powers of the state leaking data about an individual… to try to destroy a politician.” As a description of Spanish politicians’ favorite tactic, that would be hard to improve.
Ayuso’s brother, Tomás Díaz Ayuso, was also accused of tax fraud in 2022. This time, rather than blaming Sánchez, Ayuso accused her own party’s national leadership of trying to “destroy” her “personally and politically.” When Sánchez referenced the accusations against Ayuso’s brother in Congress the following year, cameras caught her reaction in the public gallery: she appeared to mouth the words hijo de puta (“son of a bitch”).
Sánchez, too, has played the victim. Last April, corruption allegations were filed against his wife, Begoña Gómez, by the civic organization Manos Limpias, whose leader has links to the Spanish right. Feijóo, eager for revenge, swiftly demanded Sánchez’s resignation (although the allegations against Gómez were poorly substantiated). Somewhat bizarrely, the prime minister took five days off to “consider” his options and eventually decided to remain, declaring: “[This is] about deciding what kind of society we want. We have let the mud soil our public life for too long”—a condemnation of the mud-slinging tactics he himself had used against Ayuso.
If the allegations against Vox are proven true, all three of Spain’s biggest parties will have corruption on their record. The current ranking, from most to least corrupt, would go as follows: PP in first place with Gürtel; the Socialists in second with ERE (and possibly Koldo); and Vox in third, with its illicit badges and piggy banks. None of these parties would be able to accuse the others of corruption without hypocrisy. But perhaps that doesn’t matter; they could still argue about who’s the most corrupt.
