Spain in Waterfall Mode

It’s simple: the torrent of corruption allegations engulfing the Socialist Party is no longer news — it’s geography. Not the Niagara Falls, not the Iguazú, not even the world’s tallest cataracts like Tugela can match the deluge of scandals spilling over Pedro Sánchez’s government on a daily basis.

Sánchez has become the irreplaceable witness to his own undoing. Yet he remains there, with inexplicable resilience — as if his face were forged from titanium and his stomach filled with enriched uranium. Ironically, that is precisely the substance he claims Spain lacks. Spain has uranium, but it doesn’t refine it. Sánchez, on the other hand, seems to enrich everything around him — friends, allies, family members, bureaucrats — except the uranium. He insists it should enrich itself, and then maybe he’ll figure out how to make it ordinary uranium again.

Around him, names parade like a football team lineup: Koldo García, José Luis Ábalos, Jésica Rodríguez, Santos Cerdán, Isabel Pardo de Vera, Begoña Gómez, David Sánchez, Gustavo Matos, Víctor de Aldama, Miguel Ángel Gallardo, Álvaro García Ortiz, and more. If you included all their advisors and hangers-on, you could fill Anduva Stadium — home of CD Mirandés — to the rafters with the cast of this beleaguered crew. And yet none of this seems to galvanise an opposition that, with honourable exceptions, remains entangled in its own internal agenda.

Alberto Núñez Feijóo is a reasonable candidate in irrational times. Yet he does not appear capable of doing what Spain needs someone to do right now: confront Sánchez directly. That task, clearly, should fall to the younger leaders the People’s Party possesses. They know it. The party intuitively senses it. Feijóo fears it. But like any aging institution, the PP continues to push its leader up the conventional ramp — as if repeating the ritual would somehow restore belief.