Amid mounting speculation over his own future, the prime minister called a news conference in a bid to distance himself from the creeping scandal. He said he knew absolutely nothing about the corruption affair and instead pledged to restructure the leadership of his Socialist PSOE party.<\/p>\n
He rejected calls for early elections, insisting the next national vote would not take place until 2027 and his government would continue its “political project”.<\/p>\n
“This is not about me, and it’s not about the Socialist party,” he said.<\/p>\n
Despite his seven years in power, S\u00e1nchez heads a shaky coalition, secured after the conservative Popular Party won 2023 elections but failed to form a government. <\/p>\n
While the opposition demanded answers on Thursday, deputy prime minister Yolanda D\u00edaz from left-wing coalition partner Sumar said she also wanted explanations. <\/p>\n
It was S\u00e1nchez’s first appearance answering media questions since a national power outage that hit Spain in April.<\/p>\n
Speaking from Socialist party (PSOE) headquarters in Madrid, the prime minister said he had until Thursday morning been persuaded of Santos Cerd\u00e1n’s integrity and wanted to apologise to Spanish citizens.<\/p>\n
“There is no such thing as zero corruption,” he said. “We shouldn’t have trusted him.”<\/p>\n
Sanchez said that like many others he had his faults and asked the Spanish people for forgiveness.<\/p>\n
He went on to accuse the conservatives of besieging his government on a multitude of issues.<\/p>\n
S\u00e1nchez has faced repeated political crises and in April 2024 threatened to stand down.<\/p>\n
He took five days to decide on his future in April 2024, when a court decided to open preliminary proceedings against his wife over allegations surrounding her business dealings.<\/p>\n
Then too he called a televised news conference, and in a moment of high drama announced he had decided to stay on in the job.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Amid mounting speculation over his own future, the prime minister called a news conference in a bid to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":178797,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5312],"tags":[2000,299,104],"class_list":{"0":"post-178796","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-spain","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-spain"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114671317439399407","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178796\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/178797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}