"I need to stop and reflect. I urgently need to answer the question of whether it is worth it, despite the sewer which the right and the far right want to make of politics. Should I continue at the head of the Government or renounce this high honour". This paragraph contained in a letter addressed to the public by Pedro Sánchez has turned Spanish politics upside down this Wednesday evening. Never before has a Spanish prime minister speculated in this way about his possible resignation and taken it to such a personal level: "Having reached this point [the attacks against him and his wife, Begoña Gómez], the question I legitimately ask myself is: is it worth it? I don't know. This attack is so serious that I need to stop and think about it. Many times we forget that behind politicians there are people. It doesn't make me embarrassed to say it, I'm a man deeply in love with my wife who is living defencelessly amidst the dirt that they smear over her day after day."
No political series of all those released around the world in recent years contains as many plot twists as the one entitled "Pedro Sánchez". The politician is so disconcerting, so unpredictable and, as he has explained hundreds of times, he has come back from political death, so everything that surrounds him is surprising. His book Manual de resistencia ("Resistance Manual") is a compendium of his vicissitudes and his way of playing Russian roulette. No one knows for sure if he is taking a high-stakes gamble to stir up personal emotional support after Madrid Court No 41 opened preliminary proceedings against Begoña Gómez to investigate the relationships she has maintained with several private companies that ended up receiving funds and public contracts from the Spanish government. Or if, on the contrary, the famous mobile phone that suffered a Pegasus spyware attack and exposed a security breach which allowed 2.6 gigabytes of data to be extracted contained the sensitive material that the government always denied. Or, if his insistence on the recognition of the Palestinian state has brought him some unpleasant consequence.
No political series of all those released around the world in recent years contains as many plot twists as the one entitled "Pedro Sánchez"
It could be one of these three reasons, all of them together or something else. Or merely his own strategy, although speculating about one's own resignation is always a slippery slope. With Sánchez, everything has a certain quality of shifting sands that must always be taken into account. Having stated that, there is little more to add, since the least credible of all are the excuses he gives: the attacks on his wife or on himself by the right and far right. No, prime minister. For the person who made "Resistance Manual" into the book title that also serves for his biography, and makes his adventures and misadventures a game in which he always coincidentally wins, the criticisms are more than assumed. Because, although right at this moment, he might think that no one has ever gone through the ordeal he is going through, that is radically false. There is really no comparison with those who have really had a hard time with something more than attacks from the media or in Parliament.
Comparing the ordeals of political wives, that of the partner of president Carles Puigdemont stands out. There would not be enough to fill a notebook in the case of Begoña Gómez when seen beside the multiple volumes that would be taken up by the merciless and false articles against Marcela Topor. "The Romanian witch", was the title used in ABC's supplement Mujer and the Semana magazine. Insulted for her Romanian origin, that she came from La Jonquera - where Spain's great brothel is found - and that she is suspected of occult practices. All this, amidst a campaign to dehumanize Puigdemont, compared to which, that of Sánchez is child's play. In other words: yes. Sánchez is being attacked, the weapons of communication and social networks that exist now have changed the paradigm of such attacks. All that is true. Or what of the case of Artur Mas's wife, Helena Rakosnik, falsely accused of working in a Barcelona Metropolitan Transport office, with her siblings and children as beneficiaries of massive incomes when her husband was president.
Not to mention the no-holds-barred offensive against the whole of the Catalan independence movement. Here, there have been many who took the attacks as best they could and, above all, what endured as a resistance manual was the knowledge that everything done was part of a campaign that had no tenacity. We will see what the next chapter reveals: resignation or revocation? Perhaps one has to start believing that it's the first.