José Luis Ábalos Meco, 65, entered the door of the Madrid prison of Soto del Real yesterday. And it’s really difficult to get out. The former minister, the first deputy in history to jump from the bench to the cell, faces personal torture as of today. Ábalos, as his entourage explains to LA RAZÓN, has a deep aversion to authority. So much so that as soon as he was expelled from the PSOE to pass the Mixed Group, he boasted of not being subject to any discipline. His gaze, always alert, lived with the tension of someone who dedicates his schedule exclusively to defending himself in the media and in the courts against everything he is accused of.
Ábalos, grandson of a civil guard and son of a bullfighter, does not tolerate authoritarian figures well, they make him uncomfortable, they make him tense. In part, because of his own family history. Perhaps that is why, sources close to him explain, he became a left-wing revolutionary who was active in communism until 1981.
So the mere fact that he is already submitting to the prison regime, with its internal codes and its jailers, does not bode well for the President of the Government. And they both know it. The Supreme Court judge ordered Soto because of the “extreme” and “maximum” risk of flight. Who knows if to Latin America, Ábalos’s vital passion.
The man who built Pedro Sánchez’s presidency knows that it is very likely that he will collapse in prison. There is no one better than yourself to know yourself. The Executive also knows this, which activated a damage control operation days ago. In fact, several of Ábalos’ former colleagues in the Council of Ministers and in the socialist bench admit that the train upsets anyone, that it makes people cuckoo.
In short, in Moncloa they know that bars wither the spirit and feed resentment. Sánchez has every reason to be more than nervous. The Valencian politician was everything for the president. Before and after arriving at Moncloa. The reality is that Sánchez’s tactical movements after the convulsive federal committee of October 1 without Ábalos, who became more than just an advisor, are not understood. Perhaps in a real Machiavelli who whispered to the prince.
«The socialist position of refusing to let the right govern identifies with you. “You have accumulated an immense political capital of coherence and you cannot transfer that to anyone,” he told Sánchez when the current president took the “no” to Mariano Rajoy as his flag.
Sánchez himself especially remembers the words of Ábalos those days of anxiety: «Credibility and coherence are not transmitted nor inherited, Pedro. You are the one who has to do it, otherwise this will not be won. And right at that moment he knew that he “had no choice.” That’s how it was. Ábalos gave Sánchez the necessary boost to fly. And almost ten years later, that man who slapped Mariano Rajoy in Congress for the sentence of the Gürtel plot slept in jail for his own plot: that of his ministry.
In the Government and in the party they know that the blow is mortal. That this is over. Without Budgets – yesterday Congress brought down the spending ceiling – and with the second former secretary of organization sleeping in Soto del Real in less than six months – after Santos Cerdán – continuing is reckless. And even more so with Ábalos and his former assistant Koldo García behind bars. The former minister has thrown several grenades in the last few hours, although they were not the first (his personal conversations with the head of the Government have already been leaked). And, predictably, they will not be the last either.
Ábalos confirmed an alleged meeting of the president with Arnaldo Otegi and accused Yolanda Díaz of irregularly using his ministerial home during the pandemic. Therefore, no one is capable of saying that there is not a colossal bomb on the corner about to explode the Executive. Although in Moncloa they trust that it will not be like that. “I don’t see Ábalos following that type of strategy, to be honest,” concedes an important executive minister.
The anti-corruption prosecutor’s office drew a much broader perimeter than the irregular purchase of masks in the middle of the pandemic, the origin of the “Koldo case.” The prosecutor also includes the hiring of Jésica in the public companies Ineco and Tragsa, the rental of the Plaza de España apartment for a close friend of the former minister, the incorporation of another of her close friends, Claudia Montes, in Logirail and the operation of the Alcaidesa chalet, in Cádiz. A rosary of favors that became mechanics.
But there is more, the former minister’s stay in a holiday villa in Marbella, his participation in the rescue of Air Europa, the efforts to shore up the hydrocarbons plot and the lease – with an option to buy – of an apartment on Paseo de la Castellana.
A catalog of actions that, for the Prosecutor’s Office, reveals a sustained pattern immediately after the PSOE evicted the PP from Moncloa. As soon as that motion of censure was over, Ábalos made a reference to Borgen – a Danish political series –: «Borgen… what Borgen? “Spanish politics is much more exciting and authentic!” he said before the newly elected president, Pedro Sánchez. The socialist leader confessed it in his Resistance Manual.
And he analyzed, as a politician, what happened that day: “On June 1, 2018, a change became real that had not been possible in March 2016. Rajoy’s political cycle had already ended two years before, and the country was dying, including the PP itself.” It is worth asking why Sánchez, who was able to correctly see the end of Rajoy two years earlier, is apparently determined to extend the legislature until 2027 despite being under the same siege that overthrew the former president of the PP.
As this newspaper reported, no one in the PSOE or in the Government wanted to imagine Ábalos in jail. But since yesterday it is an absolute reality. Sánchez, aware that the “Koldo case” could destroy his reputation, already asked Ábalos not to put it at risk. But day by day, the trail of breadcrumbs leads to a reality that converges with appearance: that the President of the Government was able to look the other way while Ábalos and Santos Cerdán were useful to him.
He cared little about the rumors, perhaps because politics is a nest of them; each and every one of them aimed at destroying the career of the one who shines brighter than you. This newspaper already reported that a former senior official of the PSPV-PSOE warned Sánchez, in 2017, that his then right-hand man – yes, Ábalos – resorted to prostitution and led a life incompatible with the party’s ethics. The PP heats up the street.