Since this Tuesday, the brother of the current Prime Minister must be called a criminal. And not for having composed The Dance of the Cherimoyas, a musical crime from which he was ultimately acquitted as well as from influence peddling, but for necessary cooperation in a crime of administrative misconduct: he was the first beneficiary of the creation and handpicked granting of a position paid with taxpayer money. Three judges have decided the extinction of the presumption of innocence of David Sánchez Pérez-Castejón: he is a convicted misfeasor sentenced to serve nine years of disqualification.
Read more The PP describes the conviction of Sánchez’s brother as «historic»: «No one is above the law»
The democratic reaction to this ruling, especially from a left-wing democrat – that is, a citizen who opposes the privilege of the powerful and defends equality for all before the law – must be one of outrage. “We are shocked by the unusual fact that someone with the right surname took advantage of his kinship with the leader of our party, which is still called socialist, to snatch the public position that would have rightly belonged to any of the other candidates who competed for it solely on the merit of their effort, preparation, and talent. It embarrasses us that something like this happens in the country’s leading social-democratic family: of three possible convictions – attorney general, secretary of organization, and brother – all three have materialized. We expect an urgent appearance from the president, immersed in other scandals incompatible with the dignity of his office and our party, to announce the immediate calling of elections, in which he can no longer run.” This is something we would hear in any Scandinavian country, in Portugal, or in Germany. Unfortunately, what we are hearing from the Spanish left is the same as what is heard in the United Kingdom or France from the far right, whose candidates have just suffered judicial setbacks.
The argumentative convergence (“lawfare“) between Nigel Farage or Marine Le Pen and Óscar Puente or Elma Saiz occurs because the PSOE is now nothing more than a family in the Sicilian sense. Against the investigator Biedma they sent her to the sewer because Santos and Leire had the same faith in David’s innocence as in their own. That is why the rest of the legislature will be the stage of the final battle between the mafia and Justice.
