As an experienced leader, José Luis Ábalos knows perfectly well the difference between political and criminal responsibility. The judicial investigation may not have reached it yet, and it may never reach it, but the scandal of the commissions in the purchase of masks in which a close collaborator of his is involved enters fully, without nuances, into the first sphere. Ábalos, former Minister of Development and former number three of the PSOE, knows this and, however, has preferred to entrench himself in his seat, move to the Mixed Group and assume the suspension of militancy from the party to which he has belonged for four decades.
The arguments he has offered for not renouncing his membership as a deputy ring hollow, with some statements (“I do not intend to end my career as a corrupt person when I am innocent”, “I face all political power”) more typical of a first-timer in the cruel exercise of politics than that of someone who has a postdoctorate in the organic life of a party. And if there is one thing the Valencian politician knows inside out, it is how the socialist machinery works. Ábalos, who was Secretary of Organization of the PSOE, would have demanded that Ábalos, a deputy accused of a corruption case, resign without hesitation, without remorse. Mercilessly.
The decision to continue as a deputy is a point and followed in the strange and unexplained distance between Ábalos and Pedro Sánchez. Along with Adriana Lastra, Ábalos was one of the few socialist officials who opted for Sánchez when he decided to wage an all-out battle once morest Susana Díaz and almost all of the party’s nobles for the leadership of the PSOE. In 2021, his removal as minister and number three in the party was already surprising, because no one saw his fall from grace coming. What happened these days is proof that there are chapters to be written.
Ábalos’s challenge to Sánchez adds a little more complexity to a legislature in which everything seems to be taken by pins and needles. If at the institutional level the amnesty is conditioning almost all of the Government’s action, at the organic level Sánchez apparently has a small waterway before him. But be careful: in the PSOE the small roads become uncontrolled torrents without interruption.
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