Sexual assault allegations leave Spanish left-wing coalition partner reeling

MADRID — A barrage of sexual assault allegations against a leading politician on Spain’s left have dealt a huge blow to Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s governing coalition and undermined its feminist agenda.

Íñigo Errejón, a parliamentary spokesman for Sumar, the junior partner in the Socialist-led government, resigned after a journalist published an anonymous allegation by a woman on social media last week. 

Within hours of his resignation, the actor and TV presenter Elisa Mouliaá filed a police complaint accusing the politician of sexual assault in 2021. Cristina Fallarás, the journalist who brought the first case to light, now says she has gathered testimonies of 16 women who say they were Errejón’s victims.

Errejón has not responded at length in public to the allegations, except for an obliquely worded resignation letter in which he admitted to “mistakes” and warned that in front-line politics there was “a toxic subjectivity which in the case of men is amplified by the patriarchy.” However, the affair is seen as damaging to the strident brand of feminism which the Sánchez government has promoted.

Errejón, 40, was one of the most prominent figures of the new left that emerged a decade ago to challenge Spain’s traditional political powers. A co-founder of the far-left Podemos, his parliamentary skills and political nous were seen as key to the party’s early rise. He later formed Más Madrid, which in turn became part of Sumar, a broad platform of parties to the left of Sánchez’s Socialists.

“This scandal could be a fatal blow for Sumar as a brand and an organization,” Pablo Simón, a political scientist at Carlos III University, said.

“This creates a lot of very uncomfortable questions for Sumar,” he added. “Was this known about before? If it was, why was nothing done about it?”

Both Sumar and Más Madrid, which have placed feminist issues at the center of Spanish politics, have been scrambling to answer such questions.

“If I had known about such serious actions previously, I would have acted just the same way I have done,” said Yolanda Díaz, who is a deputy prime minister, labor minister and the de facto leader of Sumar.

Díaz said that when she confronted Errejón about the first allegations that came to light last week, he admitted to “attitudes that were chauvinistic and degrading to women,” and she immediately called on him to resign.

Loreto Arenillas, Errejón’s former chief of staff and a member of the regional assembly for Más Madrid, was expelled from the party soon after the scandal broke when an old social media post came to light accusing her of burying an allegation that he had fondled a woman at a festival in June 2023.

Díaz said that she had known about that case but had been told that the post in question had been deleted and the investigation into it closed.

The main opposition conservative Popular Party (PP) has accused Sumar of performing a cover-up. 

“They made themselves out to be a feminist party and they have supposedly hidden cases of sexual assault,” Miguel Tellado, a spokesperson for the conservatives, said. The PP’s leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, went further, accusing the prime minister of concealing the scandal.

Sumar performed poorly in this year’s European election, putting in doubt the long-term stability of Sánchez’s coalition government, which also depends on an array of Catalan and Basque regional parties. Before the Errejón case broke, a corruption scandal implicating former Socialist minister José Luis Ábalos had been hogging the headlines.

Spain’s next general election is not due until 2027. The government’s most immediate hurdle is to approve next year’s budget.

“If there were elections right now, this government wouldn’t be able to continue, because the space to the left of the Socialists has been destroyed,” Simón, the political scientist, said.

“This is a government which has completely lost control of the political agenda,” he added.