It attacked the presumption of innocence to promote a battle of the sexes

This week, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) has been strongly shaken by several sexual harassment scandals.

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The sexual harassment scandals in the PSOE

In recent days, several party officials have resigned after being accused of sexual harassment by various women through an internal channel. It must be noted that none of the accused has been convicted of any crime. In some cases, no evidence has even been presented against them. Under normal conditions, they should not be subjected to public finger-pointing in which they are presented as perpetrators of behaviors that the Justice system has not even had the opportunity to evaluate yet.

The right to the presumption of innocence

Article 11 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is very clear in its first point: “Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence”. The Spanish Constitution protects this right to the presumption of innocence in its Article 24.2. In a democratic country, a mere accusation should not be enough to convict someone, but as in other countries, something happened in Spain that effectively liquidated this right.

The attacks by Spanish socialists against this right

Fifteen years ago, the socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero trampled on the right to the presumption of innocence by announcing that it would be enough for someone to denounce their spouse for abuse to make them lose custody of their children, without waiting for the judge to decide: “We think of the children before the presumption of innocence”, said the first vice president of the government at the time, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba. With that pretext, socialism liquidated a fundamental right of Spanish men, a right whose purpose is to prevent someone from being convicted without evidence and through false accusations, something that has happened many times throughout history and that democracy aimed to avoid.

In December 2018, already during the socialist government of Pedro Sánchez, the then successor to Rubalcaba as first vice president of the Spanish government, Carmen Calvo, stated: “Women have to be believed yes or yes, and always”. Those statements provoked an avalanche of criticism on Twitter, since with those words, the socialist leader was attacking the right to the presumption of innocence and ignoring the fact that a woman can lie.

In March 2025, the footballer Dani Alves was acquitted after being accused of a sexual assault crime against a young woman, about which the court established that “from the evidence presented, it cannot be concluded that the standards required by the presumption of innocence have been met in accordance with Directive (EU) 2016/343 of the European Parliament and of the Council of Europe of 9 March 2016”.

Exhibiting their usual contempt for the independence of the Justice system and for judicial rulings, the government lashed out against that acquittal by stating: “What a shame that the testimony of a victim is still questioned and it is said that the presumption of innocence is above the testimony of young women, brave ones, who decide to denounce the powerful, the big ones, the famous”. These are words from the socialist María Jesús Montero, successor to Rubalcaba and Carmen Calvo as first vice president of the Spanish government.

Thus, in Spain we have already had three socialist vice presidents who have denied the right to the presumption of innocence in the face of accusations about certain crimes, simply because the accusers are women and, according to them, what they say must be believed as if a woman could not lie. It is logical to ask: if this rule can be applied to crimes of a sexual nature, why not apply it to all types of crimes? If a woman accused a PSOE member of corruption or theft without any evidence, should she also be believed and the accused automatically convicted?

Sacrificing a fundamental right to promote a battle of the sexes

What has happened in Spain is that we have a left that, after the failure of its “class struggle,” has wanted to promote a battle of the sexes, trying to capture women’s votes as it previously tried to capture workers’ votes. In this new attempt to divide Spanish society, the left decided to sacrifice a fundamental right like the presumption of innocence, thereby causing a chain of injustices that have affected innocent people who have been victims of false accusations. Socialism planted an ideological bomb in Spain to blow up society, because the left tries to gain political advantage from generating confrontation among people (workers against employers, men against women), and it did not care about the harm it could cause to innocent people.

Now their ideological bomb explodes in their hands

In an act of poetic justice, finally that ideological bomb has exploded in the socialists’ hands, and now it threatens to cause an electoral debacle for the PSOE. The worst part is that they don’t even learn from it. Instead of acknowledging their mistake, they prefer to give in to the witch hunt they themselves unleashed, because in the end, for the left, individuals and their fundamental rights are less important than the ideological agenda and the political business set up by the socialists with that battle of the sexes, a business that moves a lot of public money. Let’s remember that in 2022 Sánchez announced his intention to squander 20,000 million euros on “feminist policies”.

So whether they are innocent or guilty (that will be determined by the Justice system if those accusations go to trial), the accused socialists have to sacrifice themselves so that the meat grinder that is socialism keeps running and generating significant political and economic benefits for unscrupulous people. That’s how a sect works, because in the end, that’s what the PSOE has become.