Toying with the truth

When a politician’s word loses value, democracy suffers. That’s the kind of situation that Popular Party (PP) leaders might find themselves in after spending the past few days attempting to justify hefty payments they made to their former treasurer, Luis Bárcenas. These payments suggest that the ruling party broke off relations with this former PP leader a month-and-a-half ago, and not two-and-a-half years ago, as everyone had been led to believe. This attempt at disguising the truth is very damaging to the credibility of the party in power, and it comes just a few days before the state of the nation debate, the first one since Mariano Rajoy became the head of government.

What we do know is that the PP paid its former treasurer a fixed monthly amount as well as covering his social security contributions; the party also withheld the corresponding taxes until the end of 2012, which means that this was not “compensation” for the termination of the working relationship in 2010, as claimed by PP Deputy Secretary Carlos Floriano. Politicians should not lie, not even over serious affairs of state, and this case does not even qualify as one.

It is now obvious that the PP leadership maintained a relationship with Luis Bárcenas until very recently, which is tantamount to saying it had a relationship with a former party leader who has been indicted in connection with the Gürtel case since 2009, who was stripped of his senator’s seat in 2010, and who attempted to use the government’s tax amnesty in 2012, while he was still on the payroll of the PP. Relations with Bárcenas were not broken off until the courts discovered information about the fortune that the former treasurer had squirreled away in Switzerland. The fact that he is also the author of handwritten records of incoming and outgoing money in what is suspected of being a slush fund, shows how long Bárcenas’ shadow over the party really is. There is no need to be a fanatic truth-seeker to realize that the explanations offered so far are ludicrous and politically unacceptable, and that the PP’s situation is even more delicate now than it was before toying with the truth.

The government should walk into next week’s parliamentary debate with its backroom affairs in order insofar as possible

The government should walk into next week’s parliamentary debate with its backroom affairs in order insofar as possible. But instead the suspicion of corruption is deforming everything. The way things stand, the much-awaited political event could well become a debate on the state of corruption. The PP has tried to come off the ropes by demanding that Socialist leader Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba reveal his own tax returns, as Rajoy recently did, while the Socialist Party has hit back with a demand for complete financial transparency from all politicians. Coming down on corruption and cleaning up party finances is very different from getting caught up in spectacles of questionable value when it comes to what really matters: demanding accountability over corruption cases and considering new, transparent laws and control mechanisms that will stop the kind of conduct that undermines confidence in the political class.