00:01As some of you have possibly noticed,
00:03Pedro Sánchez is positioning himself as the ultimate progressive hero,
00:07famously defying Donald Trump over the war in Iran.
00:10This is the true tragedy.
00:13Because the last thing he needed in the world was another war.
00:17And in this occasion, an illegal war.
00:19And his international popularity seems to be rising.
00:23But at home, the Spanish Prime Minister is fighting a completely different war.
00:27A massive wave of domestic corruption scandals.
00:31So what is going on there?
00:34First, the Prime Minister's wife, Begonia Gomez,
00:37is facing now trial for influence-peddling and embezzlement,
00:41accused of using her position to secure funding for her private university projects.
00:46But to make matters worse, Sánchez's inner circle is collapsing.
00:51Last June, his former senior aide, Santos Cerdán,
00:54was placed in a pretrial detention for alleged bribery.
00:57Then, in November, his former transport minister, José Luis Ábalos,
01:02and top aide, Coldo García, were placed in custody over the Coldo case.
01:08Alright, alright, but in plain English,
01:10these officials allegedly took secret cash payouts
01:13for awarding lucrative government face mask contracts during the COVID pandemic.
01:18So they might have been in the business of covering people's faces.
01:21But if these accusations prove true, they did a terrible job of covering their own tracks.
01:28And naturally, the opposition Partido Popular is demanding the Prime Minister resign immediately.
01:34However, their outrage is complicated by their own historical scandals.
01:39Most notably the Kitchen case, now in trial,
01:43where the party allegedly used state police to destroy evidence of illegal financing.
01:48So how bad is the systemic rot?
01:51According to Transparency International,
01:53in recent years Spain has suffered a significant decline.
01:56Looking at the latest EU data,
01:59Spain is placed firmly in the lower half of the 27-member bloc.
02:03They are still doing better than Italy and Poland,
02:05but they are drifting uncomfortably close to the bottom of the table,
02:08where you will find Hungary and Bulgaria.
02:10So it seems Sanchez might be standing up to Washington,
02:14but his greatest challenge is surviving Madrid.
02:18For it.
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