Juanma Lamet Madrid

Madrid

Updated Wednesday, February 28, 2024-01:56

  • 'Koldo Case' Ábalos stands before Sánchez, does not renounce the record and goes to the Mixed Group: "I am completely alone but I will defend my honor"

  • Politics The PP baptizes the case as "the Peugeot gang" and places Koldo, Ábalos, Cerdán and Sánchez as ringleaders

On Monday I called

Koldo García Izaguirre

and this time he answered.

I recognized his voice, deep and northern as if he were coming to me from a hamlet in Barakaldo.

But at the first question he regretted having picked up and he told me no, that wasn't him.

And, after hesitating four or five times in a row about what he was doing with his cell phone if he wasn't him, he switched to you to get more into the role - "as you understand, eeeeh... look... eeeh »-and he hung up abruptly.

He reminded me of that time when my brother went to

Luis Aragonés

' house to ask for an autograph, he rang the doorbell and he answered from behind the door without opening it: "I'm not there!"

What happens is that Koldo is no longer Koldo and

Ábalos

is no longer Ábalos.

The former advisor, former driver, former bodyguard and former

aizkolari

has gone from former to alleged.

His face covers all the investigations of the case because it is a transparent face: he does not know how to act either on the phone or in front of businessmen.

And yesterday his former boss crossed the imaginary, and very cinematic, border of revenge against his party.

The 25 minutes that the appearance lasted - read, but also interpreted - by the former minister reached some of the highest levels of intensity that are remembered in the Congress press room.

The staging, the dramatic pauses, the extremely underlined emotional charge of everything he was saying, the exact scripting of his thirst for revenge.

What does an emotional tear sound like?

To what Ábalos said when he proclaimed himself the nemesis of

Pedro Sánchez

.

"I want those who want to throw me out to look me in the face," he proclaimed, as if possessed by

Liam Neeson

.

Immediately converted into a movie villain for the PSOE, the new star deputy of the Mixed Group (sorry,

Ione Belarra

) perfectly played the archetype of the renegade who swears to make amends and who promises to clear his name even if he has to do it from the chicken coop. of the Hemicycle.

Even if it is at the cost of facing "everyone" alone.

Even if it is the last thing he does: «I cannot end my political life as a corrupt person.

"I know what a political stinker is."

Everything sounded sincere, regardless of whether or not it was a flight forward or a spectacular smokescreen.

In form, it was easily the best speech of his career.

And in writing (who helped you?).

Basically, it meant the atomic blowing up of all his ties with the PSOE, with his house.

There was a passage that concentrated in a few seconds all the film pyrotechnics with which he was peppering his defense statement: «I come alone in my car, I don't have a secretary, I don't have anyone behind me, nor next to me.

I face all the political power, who was going to tell me.

From one side and the other.

And I have to do it alone.

Everything set up Ábalos in a trance, convinced that he has nothing to lose and exhibiting bombproof determination.

What he wanted to tell us is that he is going to confront his friend the President of the Government with his same weapons.

With his own

manual of resistance

.

The minister around whom a plot of illegal commissions sprang up in the midst of the gold rush of the pandemic painted himself as a victim of a system that wants to engulf him, which has created "an artificial environment to condemn me."

Alone, in his car, like in that Peugeot 407 that united them from town to town against the PSOE apparatus.

After he finished, on the verge of tears, his discursive display against his party ("I would have liked to have the benefit of camaraderie"), I asked Ábalos if Sánchez had contacted him: "No, only

Santos Cerdán

».

And if they had explained to him why they were going to expel him from the party.

Nor, he said, because "there are no longer norms" in the PSOE, but rather vertical mandates.

On the way to the registry to formalize his move to the Mixed Group, he wanted to clear up the arithmetic conjectures about his departure: "I will vote like the Government."

It is his last promise of

loyalty

, before definitively transforming into the

Edmundo Dantés

of the PSOE.

Like Dumas

's Count of Monte Cristo

, Ábalos plots from his confinement - he calls it "civil cancellation" - his

vendetta

against his former friend,

Ferdinand

/Pedro.

Beyond the story, what weighs is the threat to Ferraz and Moncloa.

"I have many answers and I will give them," he warned.

Translation: "I have plenty of blankets to throw around."

Podemos, UPN, BNG, Canarian Coalition, Ábalos... that Mixed Group is going to be the Primavera Sound of pending accounts.

EXTRA BALL

WHEN THE GHOST OF THE PRESUMPTION OF INNOCENCE APPEARED TO THEIR HONORS

Although the opposition has made Koldo's plot a 'casus belli' and targets all the political leaders who contracted with it, José Luis Ábalos did manage to obtain the approval yesterday - privately, of course - from some deputies of the PP and Vox to one of their arguments.

Which?

That of respect for the presumption of innocence before taking drastic measures to expel a politician from public life.

It is not that there are parliamentarians who believe that Ábalos should not resign, but rather that they believe that in his speech he touched on a key that will have to be "rethought" in the future.

TWO YEARS IN A DRAWER: WHY DID THE GOVERNMENT NOT REPORT THE CONTRACTS OF THE PLOT?

When the pandemic broke out, a 'rat race' was also unleashed to obtain medical supplies (almost) at whatever cost.

Who more and who less, everyone launched into the gold rush of Chinese masks, with hardly any controls.

But there was a senator, Teresa Ruiz-Sillero (PP), who asked to investigate it since July 2021, with the first suspicions.

She registered a request for a -mandatory- report on the Management Solutions contracts (the company in the Koldo case), but the Government never responded and the initiative expired at the end of the legislature, in June 2023.