Thousands of socialist militants from all over Spain listened with apprehension on Tuesday to the statement with which José Luis Ábalos announced his decision to keep his seat and move to the Mixed Group, minutes before the governing bodies of the PSOE opened a disciplinary file once morest him that includes the precautionary suspension of militancy. There is no doubt that this will result in definitive expulsion, following the ordinary procedures, for having incurred a serious offense. The party asked him to leave the minutes and he has refused. The management of this profound crisis has caused confusion to run through the more than century-old socialist organization on Tuesday, according to testimonies from provincial and regional officials. How the determining pillar of Pedro Sánchez’s organic and political project has come to be pilloried; how the former Minister of Public Works refuses to hand over his membership certificate to the party following having been the most genuine representative of the party’s orthodoxy and patriotism. There are and will be no public defenders who applaud his move to the Mixed Group, but their warnings are shared that the PP has written it off and now they are going following Pedro Sánchez, the president of Congress and several ministers.
José Luis Ábalos’ speech, read with an enormous exercise of emotional restraint until the end, when he expressed affection and respect for his former colleagues from the Socialist Group, was received with regret, according to testimonies collected from numerous interlocutors. The obvious was highlighted: Ábalos wanted to bring the fall and comeback of Pedro Sánchez to the socialist collective imagination. He was in the new project from the first moment; even before the general secretary had decided to take the step forward and win the leadership of the organization with the vote of the militants. The parallel that Ábalos perhaps wanted to establish this Tuesday with Pedro Sánchez is refuted by different sources who experienced the events closely. Pedro Sánchez was a victim of the barons, who saw the opportunity to defenestrate him in the federal committee on October 1, 2016 for his refusal to abstain in Congress and facilitate the investiture of Mariano Rajoy. Later, the militants supported him with their votes in the May 2017 primaries. Ábalos can be considered a victim, but in his shadow a collaborator committed a crime, taking advantage of the minister’s name and power, territorial sources point out. There are cautions regarding how the judicial investigation will end, but in the PSOE there is a strong inclination to believe that the former minister is not part of the corrupt plot.
In this regard, the Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, has put specific names to the argument of the federal leadership. Josep Borrell abandoned the candidacy for the presidency of the PSOE Government, obtained in primaries, when it was discovered that two of his collaborators during his time as a member of the Executive had defrauded the Treasury. “A good socialist cannot go to the Mixed Group, and José Luis Ábalos is one; “a great minister and a great Secretary of Organization,” said Puente following the former minister announced that he was joining that group. Political responsibility is inexorable in this case, according to Puente, who gave the example of Borrell, completely oblivious to any irregular behavior.
In the last hours the certainty began to spread that Ábalos was not going to leave his seat. The attempts of his successor, Santos Cerdán, were in vain. Ábalos maintains the conviction that this gesture would only bring him a personal stigma for life. When everything happened and he continued without being charged, nor accused, nor judicially related to the plot, as he predicted on Tuesday, nothing and no one would compensate him for such injustice. There was no possibility of an amicable exit. The management wanted him to leave voluntarily and, far from that option, he hoped that his party would come out to defend him and not claim his seat. “There has been no camaraderie and I am alone once morest all the political power, on one side and the other,” he lamented.
His loneliness is not gratifying for socialist deputies and senators who, on the other hand, might not agree with him on Tuesday either. The discomfort of seeing him from now on in the Mixed Group was reflected in the hallway conversations. “He has had a lot of power as a minister of the investment ministry par excellence and as Secretary of Organization in the party; but power is not always synonymous with acceptance of everything he did.” Territorial sources emphasize that Ábalos supported Pedro Sánchez’s project with absolute dedication, but that happened in 2017; Before, he was a provincial leader, in reference to Valencia, and the party existed and will continue to exist, say leaders without special ties to the former minister. In these years, the Secretary of Organization has forged very close ties, however, and there has been no shortage of signs of solidarity. “The party leadership has done well in setting a very clear ethical bar because it is their responsibility,” declared the president of Castilla-La Mancha, Emiliano García-Page, on Tuesday on Onda Cero, very far from Pedro Sánchez, but without doubts regarding to what the former minister should do with his seat.
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