Josean Izarra Vitoria

Victoria

Updated Wednesday, February 28, 2024-01:50

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Santos Cerdán León (Milagro, 1969) is the key to a strange triangle of complicities that, until yesterday, was completed by his former boss José Luis Ábalos and his sponsored Koldo García Izaguirre.

"Stricken", in the terminology used by Ábalos with which he staged the failure of Santos Cerdán, the outstanding student in Ferraz's plumbing who in 2017 made the leap from the Parliament of Navarra to pursue a career in Madrid, taking Koldo García with him, the "do-it-all guy" ready day and night to solve any assignment from his boss.

For the last ten days, Santos Cerdán has put aside his sporadic visits to Milagro (Navarra), the town where his parents live.

In his absence, the rumor mill of his Ribera countrymen credits him with the purchase of a wonderful apartment in the best area of ​​Madrid.

Loved and hated in equal parts in his own town (54% of the electorate votes PSOE and 44% UPN), his neighbors cannot believe that the "tough and insistent" Santos Cerdán has failed with Ábalos.

Two qualities that have been expressed by this industrial electronics technician who, practically on the sly, made the leap from a town of 3,000 inhabitants to the Provincial Parliament in 2014.

A socialist from the Navarrese Ribera - UPN's vote barn - Cerdán left his position as head of the Gelagri packaging line ten years ago, with a leave of absence due to public office, to occupy a seat in the opposition of the regional Parliament.

There, Cerdán began to weave the network of political and personal complicities of those who today are the pillars of the PSOE of Navarra.

President

María Chivite

and her parliamentary battering ram and also organizational secretary of the PSN

Ramón Alzórriz

were part of a visible clan at the summer parties in La Ribera.

Cerdán, Chivite and Alzórriz shared a political group and even electoral lists with Koldo García and his wife

Patricia Uriz

, a determining factor in explaining how García - a Basque from Barakaldo - became an obedient PSN militant.

"Discreet plumber"

All of them, with Cerdán at the head, saw how the sky of politics and, perhaps, also of power, opened when Pedro Sánchez decided to revolt against his own party and found in Santos and Koldo two of his most faithful squires to rise from its ashes.

«When Sánchez achieves the general secretary, Santos Cerdán takes over the PSN.

The discreet plumber assumed absolute control of Navarrese socialism and designed how to remove UPN from institutional power," recalls one of his former colleagues in the Provincial Chamber.

With Navarra in his grasp, Cerdán was commissioned to be the secretary of territorial coordination of the PSOE in June 2017. Two months later, he left the regional Parliament, settled in Madrid and took with him his faithful Koldo García Izaguirre, his companion when He transferred to Ferraz the guarantees that reopened the doors of the PSOE to Sánchez.

From the PSOE headquarters, Cerdán worked for Ábalos, then a busy Transport Minister who cared much less about trains than the hidden lives of his regional general secretaries.

Cerdán placed Koldo next to Ábalos and the minister hired Patricia Uriz in his ministry.

The Cerdán-García-Ábalos entente increased everyone's power.

Until July 13, 2021, Ábalos suffered the first political knife from his Navarrese ally.

The PSOE dismissed him as secretary of organization so that Cerdán could take his place.

Ábalos was silent then.

Cerdán became omnipresent in weaving Sánchez's network of alliances with Bildu, PNV and later with Junts.

But Justice was already running in the shadow of Koldo García.