Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez seems to have officially launched his promised “cleaning” of the Spanish media this Thursday.
His party, Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), announced it was taking legal action against a veteran journalist simply for saying that Sánchez’s career would come to a “tragic” end.
Following Sánchez’s announcement on Monday that he would stay on as PM, Bieito Rubido, director of news website El Debate, said in a video discussion on his site:
If he continues, he should prepare himself because his end is going to be more tragic. I don’t know how or where or why but this man today has bought the tickets to finish his political career in the most tragic way possible, because he will take the situation to such an extreme and within his psychological profile it will force the [democratic] machine so much that this will end badly, though I insist I don’t know how.
Immediately following Rubido’s statements, the PSOE demanded on X that the journalist “immediately rectify his statements,” although it did not specify what it found so objectionable.
The governing party then said it had decided to file a suit against Rubido because he had not provided the explanations the party demanded. Supporters of Sánchez even claimed that talk of him having a “tragic” end may have been a death threat.
Sánchez had kept the country in suspense for five days following the start of an investigation into a complaint of corruption against his wife Begoña Gómez. The PM announced last week he was considering resigning over the issue, but on Monday said he would stay in post, blaming the “far right” for “attacks” against his wife.
El Debate is a Catholic newspaper founded in 1910 and successfully relaunched by Rubido as a news site a few years ago. The site was one of the leading media outlets in breaking stories about Gómez that raised questions about conflicts of interest before a citizen’s group brought forward a formal complaint that led to the opening of an investigation by the Spanish judiciary. Prior to moving to El Debate, Rubido was director of the ABC, Spain’s third largest mainstream newspaper, the most right-leaning, and historically and presently highly supportive of the monarchy.
On Monday, Sánchez wrote another open letter to PSOE members on the 145th anniversary of the party’s founding.
He claimed that Spain “faces the advance of an international extreme Right that is trying to impose its regressive agenda, not through the debate of ideas and the contrast of propositions, but for the destruction of the adversary.”
“To achieve this, they launch the mud machine, encouraged by the right and the ultra-right, along with far-right websites and associations that fabricate hoaxes and lies,” he added. He also accused opponents of “judicializing” these hoaxes, something which is “seriously deteriorating our democracy and our coexistence,” he added.
In a statement on Thursday, Deputy Prime Minister Teresa Ribera appeared to row back slightly, denying any intention on the part of the PSOE to “demonize any journalist,” adding
it is important to exercise responsibility on the part of everyone: in public life, at the head of institutions and also in the media, which have a very important task.
The centrist website Vozpopuli, which is also critical of Sánchez, came to Bieito’s defense, with columnist and award-winning journalist Miquel Giménez praising his record as an accurate, measured, and witty voice in Spanish media. He also warned that the Socialists’ legal actions against a journalist for merely criticizing the government have far-reaching repercussions.
“We are all Bieito, in the understanding that anyone who dares to publish something that Sánchez does not think is appropriate knows that they will face the wrath of that Jupiter with tight pants and a clenched jaw,” he wrote.
