Spanish PM facing impeachment motion
By Caoimhe Toman
Date: Friday 25 May 2018
(Sharecast News) - Spain's High Court has found Spain's ruling Partido Popular party guilty of benefiting from illegal campaign financing, handing down prison sentences for 29 of the 37 defendants.
Following years of investigation, judges in Madrid found that some members of the PP - but not the party itself - ran a secret slush fund from 1999 to 2008, with two of them using roughly £200,000 to finance their own race for mayor in two towns.
Hence, implicitly, the court found that the PP had saved itself those monies and asked that they be returned.
Yet neither the party itself nor Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy had been indicted and in July the latter testified that he had no knowledge of such activities nor of supposed paybacks to other members of the party.
On the other hand, Luis Barcenas, the party's ex-treasurer and ring leader, to 33 years in prison on charges of bribery, money laundering and tax evasion. Businessman Francisco Correa, whose firms were at the center of the scheme, was sentenced to 51 years in prison.
Back in 2009, Rajoy claimed that the investigation, known as the Gurtel case, "was a plot against the PP".
On the back of the ruling, the Socialist PSOE, currently the main opposition party but lagging in polls, and its leader Pedro Sánchez, said they wanted to hold a vote on impeaching Rajoy. With the backing of an absolute majority of MPs - including from pro-independence nationalists in Catalonia (and Basque country) - he would automatically be declared as the new Prime Minister.
However, Rajoy could short-circuit such a ploy by calling for early elections.
The centrist Ciudadanos party, which now leads in the polls, has said it would only support an impeachment if it were followed by early elections.
According to a poll conducted by Metroscopia in January, Ciudadanos and the centre-right PP have a slim absolute majority of voters backing them.
Helping them perhaps was a ten percentage point drop to a still high 58% over the past year in the proportion of Spaniards who define the economic climate as negative.
Indeed, despite previous attempts by the opposition parties to unseat Rajoy, including the government deadlock last year or the secessionist gambit in Catalonia, the Spanish has been among the fastest growing OECD economies over the past few years, albeit on the back of economic reforms some of which the PSOE or Podemos say they want to roll-back.
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