The identification of the names and surnames of PSOE deputies as attendees at the dinners at the Ramses restaurant in Madrid that are being investigated in the Mediator case is stretching the party's seams to unprecedented limits. Added to the "public firing squad" to which they consider themselves subject are suspicions among their own fellow seats in the Congress of Deputies about the origin of the information being published by the media, which has led to an internal climate of "nervousness » and «frustration».
"As this crisis is not managed head on, the group will end up fractured," warn parliamentary sources alarmed at the dimension that the controversy is acquiring and who fear that it could be even greater if more compromising images are published. For now, the only measure that has been activated has been to offer legal assistance to those indicated in the alleged plot so that they can take action "against those who link them to events that have not occurred at all."
At least 13 deputies and two socialist senators have been identified as alleged participants in the dinners that his partner Juan Bernardo Fuentes Curbelo organized with businessmen from the Canary Islands, whom he presumably extorted in exchange for political favors. In the party, the argument is used that it is one thing to sit at the table with someone "and another to be corrupted", but nobody puts their hand in the fire because there are no more public representatives who end the party in hotels with prostitutes and drugs aside of Tito Berni, as the former parliamentarian investigated in the plot has been nicknamed, who was known in Congress as JuanBe.
In the PSOE there are already those who equate the "damage" that this case is producing to its acronyms with that of the law of only yes is yes. Beyond the specific controversies generated by the repeal of the crime of sedition and the lowering of penalties in cases of embezzlement, until now it was considered that the greatest electoral cost would come from the entry into force of a rule that has already allowed to lower as minimum 721 convictions of rapists and have led to 74 releases.
The truth is that "until now" it has not been possible to determine if the alleged corrupt plot being investigated in Mediador managed to promote the award of contracts from the Government of the Canary Islands using the influence of Fuentes Curbelo, who until his appointment as deputy was general director of Livestock on the islands, a position in which he was succeeded by his nephew, Taishet Fuentes, also implicated. The regional Executive of Ángel Víctor Torres continues to review, in any case, documentation from the Health, Industry, Agriculture and Employment ministries in case any irregularity is detected.
But what really has the PSOE "embarrassed" are the images of parties with prostitutes and drug use in which its already former representative in Congress participated, whom it forced to resign suddenly before they even began to be disseminated by the press. . Although in Ferraz it was thought that this was how a firebreak was drawn up that would prevent the spread of the fire, two weeks later the smoke of suspicion has spread to the whole of the 120-member parliamentary group where, according to sources consulted by this newspaper, they feel subjected to to a "lynching" because, they say, they are "putting them all in the same bag."
"They give me a hundred clown legs like the deputies who go on a spree, not because of the spree itself, but because it simply seems that we are all the same and it bothers me a lot," the president of Castilla-La Mancha, said yesterday along the same lines, Emiliano Garcia-Page. He is also the only senior party official who has up to now loudly defended the "decency" and "seriousness" of the Canarian leader after the mediator who gives his name to the alleged plot, Antonio Navarro Tacoronte, tried -in a interview in EL MUNDO- to involve him in it.
On the political scope for the incalculable moment of the scandal of the Mediator case, these days in Madrid politics two of its former regional presidents are remembered: Ignacio González, who spent 200 days in prison and is pending trial for the alleged embezzlement of millions of euros of public funds from Canal de Isabel II, and Cristina Cifuentes, who had to resign after the dissemination of an old video stealing creams in a supermarket and stalked for irregularities in a master's degree. "You go out into the street and ask people which of the two things they remember," sums up a leader of the Popular Party to exemplify the type of images that permeate the electorate.
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