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Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on Wednesday said he was considering quitting after a judge opened a preliminary investigation into his wife over accusations of corruption.
The Socialist leader said he was cancelling his public duties for the next few days and would announce a decision on his future on April 29.
In an extraordinary letter to the country, Sánchez said: “At this point, the question I legitimately ask myself is: ‘Is it all worth it?’ I honestly don’t know.”
Earlier on Wednesday Juan Carlos Peinado, the judge, opened judicial proceedings against Begoña Gómez, Sánchez’s wife, over allegations she had received favours from private businesses that won government tenders and were awarded public funds.
“This attack is unprecedented and so serious and so crude that I need to stop and reflect with my wife,” Sánchez wrote on the social media platform X.
Sánchez, one of the most senior left-of-centre leaders on a European continent shifting to the right, has been in power since 2018 when he replaced a conservative prime minister felled by corruption allegations.
He began a new term late last year having cobbled together a coalition government backed by a fragile parliamentary majority after an inconclusive general election.
The proceedings against Gómez were opened after a union called Manos Limpias — or Clean Hands — filed a complaint founded on a series of stories published by news organisations, notably El Confidencial.
Sánchez called the stories the “spurious” output of “rightwing and ultra-rightwing media”.
Manos Limpias alleges Gómez received favours from executives of Air Europa and its parent company Globalia in her capacity as director of an Africa research centre that she ran for nearly four years until 2022 at IE University in Madrid.
Manos Limpias links her activity to a €475mn government bailout the airline received in late 2020 as it struggled to survive the coronavirus pandemic.
Gómez has stayed silent on the allegations in recent weeks. Globalia declined to comment.
IE University confirmed it had received four air tickets from Globalia in 2020 as part of an event sponsorship deal but said it had never received any money from the company, nor had its Africa centre.
Sánchez tied the judicial move to the rancour and toxicity of Spanish politics, which has risen to new highs since last July’s election.
He said the leaders of the conservative People’s party and the far-right Vox party — Alberto Núñez Feijóo and Santiago Abascal — had seized on the case against his wife because they themselves had stoked a storm around the original media reports.
“In this outrage . . . both are necessary collaborators, together with an ultra-rightwing online galaxy and the organisation Manos Limpias,” he wrote.
“In short, this is an operation of harassment and demolition by land, sea and air to try and weaken me politically and personally by attacking my wife.”
Sánchez added that his wife would “defend her honour” and co-operate with the justice authorities.
The allegations against her centred on events that were “non-existent”, he said.
In a radio interview on Wednesday evening, Feijóo said he had never pushed for Sánchez’s wife to be investigated and the prime minister had published a letter “saying things unbecoming of a prime minister”.
Earlier in the day, Pepa Rodríguez de Millán, a senior Vox lawmaker, said the Socialist party was immersed in a “very serious case of corruption”.
Sánchez’s conservative opponents differ with him ideologically on fiscal, labour, energy and environmental policy.
But their greatest ire has been stoked by his willingness to work with separatist parties in Catalonia and the Basque country whose goal is to cut ties with the rest of Spain.
The most contentious move of Sánchez’s premiership has been legislation to grant an amnesty to Catalan separatists involved in a 2017 bid for independence. The bill has yet to complete its passage through parliament.
The amnesty was the price Sánchez had to pay to secure the parliamentary votes he needed to begin another term after the election.
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