00:00After years of controversy surrounding Pedro Sánchez, one member of Parliament finally said
00:05what many of his critics had been hinting at for years. Then he walked away before Sánchez could
00:16answer. What did he know that the courts were about to prove? Let me break it down.
00:21The Ambush
00:22It was Wednesday, 18 June, 2025. The room was the Congreso de los Diputados,
00:29the lower house of Spain's parliament. The event was a normal government control session,
00:33the weekly hour when lawmakers get to question the prime minister to his face,
00:37but nothing about this day would feel normal. The chamber was already boiling before Santiago
00:42Abascal ever stood up. Moments earlier, the leader of the main opposition party had grilled Pedro
00:47Sánchez about a wave of corruption cases closing in on his party. The benches of the people's party
00:51had erupted, chanting one word over and over. Resign. The speaker banged for order again and
00:56again. Into that noise, the leader of Vox, Spain's hard-right party, was handed the floor.
01:01He did not open with a cruel little jab. A call back to remark Sánchez had made about the time
01:06of day just two days before. The laughter that followed was nervous because everyone in that
01:16room knew the sarcasm was only the doorway. Abascal was about to walk through it and he was carrying a
01:21list. His first question was not really a question at all. It was an accusation dressed as one and
01:26it named names. In a single breath, he had pointed at the prime minister's brother, at his wife, at his
01:40party and at a shadowy nickname that every Spaniard watching would recognize. He was not finished. He
01:50went through the cloacas of the corruptions that surround him.
01:54That word sewers was chosen on purpose. In Spanish politics, it is the language of hidden dirt, of money
01:59moving through pipes nobody is meant to see. And the nickname he had dropped, the Peugeot clan, was not a
02:04random
02:04insult. It was the tag pinned on the tight circle of men who helped Sánchez claw back control of his
02:08party in the 2017 primaries, the group who drove across Spain gathering support, famously linked to a
02:13Peugeot car, José Luis Abalos, Santos Cerdán, Colo García, and Sánchez himself. By June 2025, those same
02:21names were no longer campaign folklore, they were case files, and Abascal was just getting started.
02:27The indictments
02:29Having named the circle, Abascal now built his case around one brutal idea. While the men around Sánchez
02:35allegedly got rich, ordinary Spaniards were being bled dry. He tied it to something every citizen
02:40was doing that very week, filing their income taxes.
02:43That was raw, and it was meant to be. It was an accusation, not a proven fact. When the courts
02:54later
02:55dug into this network, their focus landed on contracts, commissions, and influence, not on litigating what the
03:00money was spent on. But Abascal was not trying to write a verdict. He was trying to paint a picture
03:04of a
03:04country where the top stole and the bottom paid, so he moved to the pain people could actually feel,
03:09housing.
03:15Here the record backed the anger, even if the exact phrasing was his own. Housing prices smashed records
03:21in 2025, climbing close to 10% in a single year, pushing homes out of reach for young people and
03:27average earners. Then he reached for a colder statistic still.
03:30Mientras su entorno robaba, cada vez más españoles están en riesgo de pobreza extrema. Mientras su
03:35entorno robaba, señor Sánchez.
03:36Official numbers told a heavy story of their own. Spain's National Statistics Agency put the share
03:42of people at risk of poverty or social exclusion at 25.7%, one in four. Then Abascal reached for his
03:48darkest charge of all, and this one the record did not confirm.
03:51A los españoles se les apagaba la luz por sus políticas y algunos morían por ello.
03:55No court had tied any death to the prime minister's energy policy. Abascal even admitted the courts
04:00would have to decide. It was an accusation hurled, not a fact settled. From there he swung to the
04:05theme his party never leaves alone, migration, framing Spain's spending as a betrayal of its own
04:11people.
04:11Se lo entregan a los inmigrantes ilegales y las ONGs que les traen para robarnos también la seguridad,
04:16la tranquilidad en las calles, especialmente las mujeres españolas.
04:19This was pure Vox framing, contested by the government at every turn, but Abascal was
04:24not aiming for balance. He was aiming for the throat, and now he explained why Sánchez
04:29was still standing at all, not strength, he argued, a deal.
04:32¿Cómo no van a apoyarle sus cómplices? Si toda España sabe que usted se sienta en el
04:36Banco Azul únicamente por un acuerdo entre clanes corruptos. Lo que sí le digo es que usted...
04:41He meant the amnesty. To win the votes he needed to form a government after the 2023 election,
04:46Sánchez backed a law wiping clean the legal cases of Catalan independence leaders. To
04:50his supporters it was peace. To the right it was a payoff. Abascal had now laid it all
04:54out. Money, housing, poverty, migration, the deal to survive. There was only the verdict
04:59left to deliver, and he delivered it slowly twice so it could not be missed.
05:03¿Es usted un indecente? ¿Lo recuerda? ¿Es usted un indecente? ¿Es usted un corrupto y un traidor?
05:09And with that Vox's benches rose to their feet in applause, and Abascal turned and walked
05:14straight out of the chamber. He would not stay to hear the reply, which meant Sánchez
05:18was about to answer an empty chair. The Reckoning
05:22Sánchez did answer. He spoke to the space where Abascal had been sitting. He accused Vox of bringing
05:27pure hatred and contempt for Spain's institutions. He pointed out that in seven years of his coalition,
05:32there had been no corruption conviction against his actual government, and that the party had
05:36already expelled the former members now under investigation. Then he did the oldest move in
05:40Spanish politics, the one they call, and you more, throwing old scandals back across the aisle.
05:45But the ground under him was already shifting, and it had been shifting for days.
05:49Just before this speech, the Guardia Civil's investigative unit had handed the Supreme Court
05:53a report of roughly 490 pages. Inside were eight secret audio recordings that pointed to Santos
05:59Cerdán, the party's number three, discussing commissions on public works contracts. Within days,
06:04Cerdán resigned his post and his seat. The old Peugeot clan nickname suddenly stopped being a joke,
06:09and started sounding like a prophecy. Because that clan did not fade, it fell.
06:13One year later, the Supreme Court convicted José Luis Abalos, the former transport minister,
06:18to 24 years and three months, and his aide Koldo García to roughly 19 years and eight months,
06:23for running what the court called a structured criminal organization.
06:26The names Abascal shouted at an empty chair had become names on a sentence.
06:30The circle Abascal drew that day only widened. A Madrid court ordered Sánchez's wife, Begonia Gómez,
06:35to stand trial before a popular jury on charges including influence peddling and embezzlement,
06:40tied to her university chair and the use of public resources. And the prime minister's own brother,
06:44David Sánchez, was convicted over a job handed to him at a PSO Iran provincial council,
06:49banned from public employment for nine years. The brother, the wife, the clan.
06:53Every target from that one speech had turned into a courtroom. And Abascal came back for round two.
06:58In a later clash, with the convictions now real, he stood again and rubbed the verdicts in Sánchez's face.
07:15He let the pause hang, then finished the thought with the sentences everyone now knew were coming.
07:20They are condemned to serious crimes of prison.
07:25Then he wrapped himself in the court's own words, drawing a clean line between the guilty,
07:29and in his telling, the clean.
07:30The party is dirty and has condemned to 24 and 19 years to the people of his trust.
07:35But Sánchez never bent to the framing. In their clashes, he kept turning the mirror back around,
07:40refusing to accept the word corruption without firing it right back.
07:44What you have to do if you want to talk about corruption is to look at the mirror,
07:49and that has stayed his defense to the end. Individual bad actors he insists people his
07:54party throughout the moment it knew. Not a system, not a betrayal. The opposition calls it the rot at
07:58the very center. Sánchez calls it the sins of a few he already punished. What is not in doubt is
08:03the
08:03moment that lit the fuse. One man, one list of names, one refusal to stay for the answer. He called
08:08the Prime Minister of Spain a corrupt man and a traitor, and then he walked out. And the courts,
08:12one case at a time, spent the next year deciding how much of it would stick.
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