Sánchez Acera’s limbo due to the ’email’ in the case of Ayuso’s boyfriend: from “he has not done anything wrong” to “we are all waiting”

The eyes of Víctor Ángel Torres, minister of the Government of Spain, light up when he hears the question. “Is the government afraid of a possible indictment of Pilar Sánchez Acera?” they asked her this Wednesday at an event honoring the Constitution. “Fear of justice, none,” responds the Canary Islands politician before it is known that the Supreme Court refuses “for now” to investigate the senior Moncloa official in the case opened against the State Attorney General for the alleged leak of an email of the case of Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s boyfriend. That exchange, however, reflects the problem facing the party. After learning that Sánchez Acera sent the email to Juan Lobato, the PP believes it has found the thread to pull to try to implicate Minister Óscar López (future general secretary of the PSOE in Madrid, and Sánchez Acera’s boss at that time) in the case. and the president of the government, Pedro Sánchez. And since everything is still pending resolution in the Supreme Court, the PSOE has chosen to do damage control. There is no explicit support. Nor criticism. Sánchez Acera has been left in a kind of limbo.

“Coming to his defense would be a mistake when there is no accusation: it may sound like An excuse not asked for, an accusation made clear.” reasons an important official of the PSOE of Madrid. “And the opposite makes no sense,” he adds. “There are times when normality is best,” he points out. “While everything is being resolved, most of us maintain a certain caution, not fearful, but normal when you don’t know everything about the matter, how it occurs, the motivation. “We are all expectant.”

The unknowns that the intermediate socialist positions maintain today are those that originated, precisely, the movement of dominoes that culminated last week in the resignation of Lobato as general secretary of the Madrid socialists. On the morning of March 14, when Sánchez Acera sent the then regional leader the email in which the lawyer for Ayuso’s boyfriend admitted the commission of two tax crimes, Lobato immediately had a doubt: where the document came from. His companion in the ranks hinted that it was from the media. Not from La Moncloa. Now, a government official also emphasizes that Sánchez Acera was the protagonist of that exchange of messages with Lobato as secretary of regional institutional policy and his collaborator.

“Pilar did what she did every Thursday: talk to Juan about the strategy for the control session with Ayuso, as his institutional policy secretary,” defends a central government source in reference to Sánchez Acera, who that day in March was compatible her position in La Moncloa (chief of staff of the chief of staff of the president of the government) with her portfolio in the regional executive. “In the messages we have seen there is nothing from La Moncloa,” he emphasizes.

But this argument is considered fragile within the PSOE itself (“distinguishing the two positions does not fit”), and is ridiculed by the PP, which does not give any credence to the thesis that the politician acted “like a lone wolf.” It is enough to review the intervention of Alfonso Serrano, general secretary of the PP of Madrid, and senator, on Tuesday in the Senate.

“Are you going to tell me that that person you trust the most did not notify you that he had the email of an individual that the State Attorney General had just obtained and that it had not been published?” Serrano asks Minister López about Sanchez Acera. “Did that person you absolutely trust not warn you that he was going to pass it on to a colleague in the Assembly to use it?” he insists. “Do you really want to make them believe that he functioned as a lone wolf for Moncloa?” he hammers. “Tell us, did you cooperate in any way in the crime of revealing secrets for which the State Attorney General is accused?”

The cascade of questions is not only the particular welcome to Madrid politics that the PP of Madrid gives to López. It represents the pressure that conservatives are willing to exert on this issue. It doesn’t matter that López denies knowing anything about the matter, or that he discredits everything Serrano says as “false.” Díaz Ayuso’s right hand returns to the fray: “You had that document, you passed it to him [a Sánchez Acera] (…) And we all know that you would not do anything like that without the president of the government knowing.”

A day later, this Wednesday, the wounds opened by that harsh intervention still sting in the PSOE. There is a feeling of grievance in the party in Madrid, where Sánchez Acera is considered simanquistthe internal current led by former secretary general Rafael Simancas, which controls 40% of the federation’s votes

“Let them blame us, the 5,000 socialists who were at the Seville congress!”, explodes a representative of the party that has been almost everything, and that has great internal weight. “They are trying to corner us,” he warns. “But they don’t scare us. Let them all charge us! If even the state attorney general is accused!” he insists. “We know where all these movements come from, and the spurious interests behind them,” he emphasizes. And he defends: “Pilar has not done anything wrong, she has not done anything punishable. Zero worry.”

Another socialist position follows the same critical line with the judicial investigation. “We can expect anything. You just have to see the speed with which he quoted Juan [Lobato, que acudió al Supremo como testigo solo cuatro días después de que se supiera que tenía el email]”.

However, Sánchez Acera’s summons has not yet occurred, despite the fact that two private accusations have requested it. The judge rejects it “for now”, waiting for the dump of Lobato’s cell phone to be analyzed, which records the exchange of messages with her party partner. Meanwhile, Sánchez Acera’s political life has been put on hold.

—I’m late.

Chased by a camera Antenna 3for politics the meters that separate her from the building where the PSOE congress is being held this past weekend, in Seville, seem eternal. At her side, her brother, former mayor of Alcobendas, flanks her as a parapet. A close collaborator of Lobato, who thought of her as a government delegate in Madrid, Sánchez Acera has been almost everything in regional politics: candidate for the regional general secretary, deputy spokesperson in the Assembly, member of the executive… Never, However, he had so many cameras and recorders hanging on his words. And now, whatever happens, a high socialist official holds, his name has been marked forever.

“What they have done to her is a very big mess,” she says about the fact that it has emerged that she was the one who provided Lobato with the email about the case of Ayuso’s boyfriend that the then spokesperson showed in the Assembly to accuse the president of having lied. . “His name is going to be marked by this shit forever.”