Spain: Embattled Sánchez resists clamour for resignation
The investigation into commissions is part of an ongoing probe which has already implicated José Luis Ábalos, a former PSOE secretary and transport minister. A third person implicated is Koldo García, an advisor to Ábalos. Both men featured with Cerdán in the recently exposed audio. All three say they have done nothing wrong.The investigation into Ábalos, which began last year, was damaging for the government but his exit from the cabinet and the PSOE secretary post in 2021 put distance between him and Sánchez. However, the implication of Cerdán is more problematic.Sánchez had repeatedly defended him in the face of claims in the right-wing media over recent months that he was under investigation, and the prime minister even accused the opposition of "slandering honest people" when asked about Cerdán's activities last month.The party secretary, from the northern region of Navarre, was a trusted confidant of the prime minister, playing a crucial role, for example, in negotiating the support of Catalan nationalists to allow the formation of a new government in 2023.Despite acknowledging that he "should not have trusted" Cerdán, Sánchez has insisted that he will see out the legislature, which is due to end in 2027.In a letter to PSOE members he apologised again, while doubling down."There are many issues that affect the lives of the majority – healthcare, housing, pensions, jobs, fighting climate change and defending equality – and for which it is worth fighting still," he wrote. "Challenges that are not solved with headlines or lynchings."However, the opposition has presented the investigation as symptomatic of a corrupt regime, pointing to other probes affecting Sánchez and his circle.A judge has been investigating the prime minister's wife, Begoña Gómez, for possible business irregularities - and his musician brother, David, is due to go on trial for alleged influence peddling in taking up a public post in the south-western city of Badajoz. Meanwhile, the Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz, is also likely to face trial for revealing confidential details of a tax evader. All three deny wrongdoing.
Sánchez and his supporters have cast these three affairs as part of a campaign orchestrated by the conservative People's Party (PP), the far-right Vox, right-wing media and factions within the judiciary. A number of judicial experts have expressed surprise at the zeal with which the investigations have been carried out.In a raucous parliamentary session this week, opposition MPs chanted "Dimisión" (Resign) at the prime minister, and Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the PP, accused him of being "a wolf who has led a corrupt pack".Paco Camas, head of public opinion in Spain for polling firm Ipsos, sees a Sánchez resignation as "political suicide" for his party, because it would almost certainly trigger elections, allowing the PP to form a government, probably with the support of Vox."The overall trend right now is a demobilised electorate on the left, particularly for the Socialist party, and an enormous mobilisation of voters on the right, which is capitalising on the discontent with the government," Camas said.Even the Socialist president of the Castilla-La Mancha region, Emiliano García-Page, has warned that "there is no dignified way out" for the PSOE.However, as long as Sánchez can keep his fragile parliamentary majority of left-wing and nationalist parties together there is little the opposition can do to bring him down.To that end, the prime minister has been frantically trying to reassure these allies, many of who have voiced outrage at the Cerdán-Ábalos scandal. Camas believes that persuading them to support a 2026 budget could be a way for Sánchez to buy some time.Nonetheless, such plans could be left in tatters were more explosive revelations to emerge, as many in the Socialist party fear.Such worries will be playing on Sánchez's mind as he heads to the Nato summit in The Hague.Normally an assured presence on the international stage, he will arrive with serious doubts about his future and under mounting pressure to raise Spain's defence spending.Although his government has promised to increase military spending to 2% of economic output this year, it has been resisting calls from the United States and the Nato leadership to raise it further. Sánchez has now refused to accept a target of 5% of GDP for military spending, saying it "would not only be unreasonable but also counterproductive".
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Times
a day ago
- Times
Constable or Lowry: which artist best represents Britain?
Paintbrushes at dawn. An art critic and a novelist have started an excitable row about which Spanish painting is the country's most significant. The critic Miguel Ángel Cajigal holds that Picasso's Guernica, a powerful (and internationally famous) antiwar canvas, is the obvious contender, and said as much on the radio. The novelist Arturo Pérez-Reverte, who professed himself 'in shock' at this, countered with Francisco Goya's Fight with Cudgels, a picture of two men viciously slugging it out in the mud, painted in the 1820s. 'Picasso painted Guernica, but Goya painted our soul,' he wrote, in what is at the very least a damning indictment of the bad-tempered state of Spanish politics. That you can perfectly well argue for either of these paintings is something that neither man seems willing to accept. But what does it mean, 'significant'? Should such a painting 'define' a nation? Should it speak to its psyche, in the way that Pérez-Reverte apparently believes Goya's brutal scene does? Should it be globally famous, like Guernica — or should it simply stop us in our tracks? • The best exhibitions in London and the UK to book for August 2025 And what, then, would ours be? France has Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, of course. I'm writing this in Scotland — would its be Henry Raeburn's Skating Minister, or does it have to have a stag in it? For Britain as a whole — whose national dish could reasonably be argued to be chicken tikka masala, a hybrid of cuisines born out of the colonial project — our 'most significant' artwork is a pretty complex question. Is it Constable's The Hay Wain (1821), evoking a preindustrial view of Britain where a pretty country pub is always just around the corner? Or is that nostalgia, making it unsuitable even if it is something we're sorely given to as a nation? • Read more art reviews, guides and interviews If it's impact you're looking for, you could do worse than Mark Wallinger's Turner prizewinning work State Britain (2007), which recreated Brian Haw's 40-metre antiwar protest camp that sat on Parliament Square in Westminster for nearly 10 years. With exhortations for peace and offerings from the public, including children's toys, combined with images of extreme human suffering, it created an environment that allowed viewers to consider the horrors of war — to contemplate the uncontemplatable. Guernica, in a different way, does the same thing. And Wallinger's work speaks to so much of what we think and know about ourselves. It reminds us of the huge numbers of Britons who turned out to protest against the war in Iraq, and of our affection for the plucky underdog, what the artist called Haw's 'single-minded tenacity'. As an imperfect answer to an unanswerable question, State Britain gets my vote. Nancy Durrant Compared with France, Italy and Spain, Britain has produced few great painters. We're generally better at writing. But there is something novelistic about the painter William Hogarth, whose pictures tell stories and have something very ungrand and deflationary and British about them. They're also genuinely comic. My favourite is Tête à Tête from Hogarth's series Marriage à la Mode. The marriage is already a disaster — the couple are bored, chaotic, unfaithful and overspending. The despairing butler leaves the room with a sheaf of bills. It's full of novel-worthy detail (the dog pulling the woman's cap out of the husband's pocket, the broken-nosed statue on the mantelpiece signifying infidelity). Compare this to the pompous and simpering aristos having their portraits painted in autocratic France at the same time. 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Richard Morrison The National Gallery's Wilton Diptych is not only this country's most important artwork but its most magical. That we have it at all, one of a handful of English panel paintings to have survived from the Middle Ages, seems akin to necromancy. Thanks to the Reformation in the 16th century, and the activities of Oliver Cromwell a century after that, the earliest chapters of our art history have largely been taken from us. Painted by an unknown artist for Richard II towards the end of the 1300s, this folding pair of panels depicts his coronation before a trio of saints and a host of angels, the latter looking like bewinged girl guides. The Wilton Diptych gives a ravishing — and, to be frank, heartbreaking — insight into our collective loss. 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Quite right. Carol Midgley You would think from the paintings commonly labelled Britain's favourites, from the likes of JMW Turner and John Constable, that the most important things about us are our sea and countryside. But surely the defining thing about this country was the Industrial Revolution. It not only changed our economics, landscape and demographics, it changed the dynamics of the world. And this is why, for me, the Wolverhampton-born artist Edwin Butler Bayliss (1874-1950) is so important. Self-taught, he painted the blast furnaces, coalmines, factories and collieries of the Black Country with the eye of a French impressionist. A landscape that an American consul to Birmingham once described as 'black by day and red by night', and that is said to have been the inspiration for Mordor in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. 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Scottish Sun
a day ago
- Scottish Sun
Lost girl, 6, sexually assaulted at major waterpark after stranger ‘offered to help her before dragging her into woods'
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The Guardian
2 days ago
- The Guardian
Spanish people know deadly heatwaves are now an annual event. So why are our politicians in denial?
Growing up in Madrid, intense summer heat was nothing unusual. I quickly learned always to cross the street in search of shade, and never to be caught out in the sun at 3pm. But as a child in the early 1980s, I never felt dizzy after spending more than a few minutes outdoors, nor did I struggle to study or sleep at home because of the heat. Back then, air conditioning was a rarity, something only Americans had. But we were fine: the stuttering fan in my mother's Ford Fiesta was enough to keep us comfortable on holiday escapes from the capital. What is happening in Spain now goes far beyond discomfort. More than 1,500 deaths have already been linked to heatwaves this summer alone. Public-sector workers are collapsing from heatstroke on our city streets. Entire communities in the Madrid suburbs have been devastated by wildfires. On Monday, 198 weather stations recorded temperatures of 40C or higher. Following a record-breaking July, the first 20 days of August will probably be the warmest on record. Alongside housing, the climate crisis is Spain's most visible and most persistent problem: every summer reminds us of this. You can't ignore it, or escape it; so why are Spain's politicians still so reluctant to tackle the climate emergency? Fighting global heating is a worldwide challenge, but protecting populations against the consequences – with an awareness that Europe is heating faster than other continents – must also be a national and a local priority. Within Spain, the climate crisis too often becomes an excuse for superficial, party-political feuds. In the population at large, there has been years of broad popular consensus, but contrast that with Spain's politicians, for whom the issue has become increasingly partisan, with the right and the left fighting over totemic policies about cars and bikes. Even Spain's centre-left coalition government, led by Pedro Sánchez's Spanish Socialist Workers' party (PSOE), has taken only modest steps to reduce emissions from industry and transport. And as they do on other issues, the socialists rush to point the finger at regional and local governments run by the conservative People's party (PP), supported in some cases by the far-right Vox, which has pushed falsehoods and conspiracy theories about the climate crisis. It is true that Spain's regional and local governments, powerful and well funded, also bear great responsibility: for protecting the most vulnerable from extreme heat, adapting public spaces, planting trees and ensuring there is sufficient shade and water fountains. One urgent necessity is the creation of 'cool banks', especially for people in overcrowded and overheated homes, those with health vulnerabilities, the very young and the very old. Valencia has a network of these climate shelters, while Barcelona has mapped out hundreds of public spaces where people can escape the heat, from libraries to museums. But too many local governments are still failing to provide respite. Madrid is among the worst offenders. Public cooling centres are almost nonexistent, and shopping centres remain the most common refuge. The capital's conservative regional and local governments have been passive or even hostile towards public demands to reduce dangerous heat levels in neighbourhoods, with too few green spaces and too many cars. When Madrid's city hall does spend money, it often misses the point: the most absurd example is Puerta del Sol, the central square that after months of renovation work still feels like a concrete frying pan all summer. Only after protests did the city council finally install a few flimsy shades, at a cost of €1.5m. For those Madrileños who have the option, the traditional way to make August bearable has been to escape the city for the coast. My childhood memories of cooler summers visiting grandparents in northern Spain feel very distant now. The north still enjoys bearable nights and some rain in the summer, but heatwaves have become more frequent there too. The change is fast and visible, even in daily life. This year in the Basque country, beach bathing has been repeatedly banned because of the portuguese man o'war, a creature resembling a jellyfish, but one that is much more toxic and dangerous. Once confined to warmer Atlantic waters, it has only begun appearing here in recent years. On a recent walk along San Sebastián's beach, I spotted dozens, fortunately tiny, each circled in the sand to warn passersby. More medical resources and surveillance are now being devoted to this new threat – another example of the small everyday adaptations we are having to make. The most dramatic consequences of the climate crisis make headlines around the world: the tragic deaths of workers in vulnerable jobs, picking fruit or cleaning streets, and wildfires killing people, destroying homes and even a Roman-era mining site – now a burned-out Unesco world heritage site. But across Spain, the signs are everywhere: crops ruined by hail, high-speed trains disrupted, and neighbourhoods baking in the heat. This is the new reality we are living with. It has become a regular fixture in our calendars. A journalist colleague of mine observed earlier this year that the most important annual climate event for the media is not Cop, it's the summer. It was February in the northern hemisphere, and he was already preparing their annual heatwave coverage. My newsroom in Madrid does the same, with ever more sophisticated data and analysis. The frustrating question is why our politicians are still shrugging off this reality, as though it were just an inconvenience. How many broken records and how many heatwave deaths will it take to change this? María Ramírez is a journalist and the deputy managing editor of a news outlet in Spain
