A serious explanation

Besides being at the head of the government for the past 13 months, Mariano Rajoy has been the leader of the Popular Party (PP) since 2004. In total, he has been a leading member of the center-right party for 24 years. For this reason, it must fall to him to offer explanations for the evidence pointing to illegal financing of the PP, in which party leaders are potentially implicated and which is also affecting his leadership as Spain undergoes a serious political and economic crisis period. The plight of the ruling party hampers and weakens the government as it attempts to deal with the key questions of the day: how to pay off Spain's sovereign debt; combat spiraling unemployment; and the response required by the Catalan bid for independence.

Such problems are more than sufficient to take up all the time and energy of a ruling party, the executive and its leader. Instead of this, political debate is tainted by alleged corruption. It is an issue that goes way back, and talk of reform and new controls on party financing do not disguise the fact that this is a deep-rooted problem, and not merely a passing affair.

The legitimacy conferred on Rajoy by the votes won by the PP in 2011 and its majority in Congress is beyond discussion. But a leader whose platform is so seriously weakened in this way needs something more than congressional support: he needs the moral support which comes from having his back covered by a united party whose conduct is beyond reproach. In 2009, after the first judicial ramifications of the Gürtel kickbacks-for-contracts case came to the fore, Rajoy assured the country that this affair was not a PP conspiracy, but rather one which was being directed "against the PP." He expressed confidence that "no one could prove" former party treasurer Luis Bárcenas and other officials were not, in fact, innocent. Politicians should avoid putting their integrity on the line in this way; it has taken three-and-a-half years for the facts relating to the fortune Bárcenas has amassed beyond the reach of Spanish tax authorities to emerge. Much time has therefore been lost. Now Rajoy neither denies nor accepts the evidence, limiting himself to waiting for the judicial process to play out and the results of the internal audit which he has ordered.

His number two, Deputy Prime Minister Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, talks about the possibility of including political parties in the Transparency Law that is going through parliament, something which was not considered when the Cabinet approved the draft legislation last summer. Time passes and the government is tossing the issue of corruption to and fro, instead of confronting the problem head on.

Before entering government, Rajoy seemed to believe that his rule as prime minister would be accompanied by the creation of employment in Spain. Since then he has had ample time to realize that this assumption was an incorrect one and that reality has proven to be more complex. Dealing with the problems of Spain's economy is far more difficult than punishing and putting a brake on corruption: the latter is a simple question of political will. The PP leadership must react quickly and decisively, in the same way that other parties have done when the issues of corruption or misuse of public funds come to the surface, such as in the case of the Socialist party and its Ideas Foundation think-tank last week. The judicial branch of government must ultimately rule on individual penal responsibilities, but policies require a much faster application.