The roller coasters of Spanish politics never rest. Now it is José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero who is plummeting. The order from the judge of the National Court José Luis Calama, made public this week, states that the former Prime Minister (2004-2011) must undergo a thorough investigation for an alleged crime of influence peddling and money laundering in the management of the bailout of the airline Plus Ultra during the pandemic. The order is not an indictment. It is a reasoned exposition of the elements that lead to the opening of a judicial investigation, with the mandatory notice to the persons who become investigated. (Until 2015, the term was imputed, but the Criminal Procedure Law was modified in favor of softer language). Imputed or investigated, Zapatero is currently on the conveyor belt of public scandal. Felipe González, his great adversary in the PSOE since Zapatero pushed for the reform of the Statute of Catalonia, called the order “impressive” yesterday and said he felt “great sadness” for what is happening.
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The documentary elements appearing in the judicial document lay out a carpet of doubts about the former president’s operations in Venezuela, a country he always favored after arriving at Moncloa in April 2004. Venezuela is today a country intervened by the United States. Nicolás Maduro is in a high-security prison in New York, after being kidnapped by a special operations team in early January. The Venezuelan leadership group, practically captured by the Trump Administration, is in a phase of decomposition; loyalties are for sale in Caracas, and Zapatero has an open file in Washington since he withdrew Spanish troops from Iraq in April 2004.
It is significant that the most adverse elements against Zapatero were provided to the Economic and Financial Crimes Unit of the National Police by the United States Homeland Security Investigations office, whose agents in Madrid were tasked with decrypting a mobile phone seized from Venezuelan businessman Rodolfo Reyes Rojas, former executive and shareholder of Plus Ultra. In a chat preserved on that phone, Zapatero is mentioned several times as an alleged mediator for obtaining the bailout of Plus Ultra.
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The data decrypted by HSI (Homeland Security Investigations) give strength, nerve, and color to the judicial investigation. Private conversations in a chat among Plus Ultra executives point to Zapatero’s intervention to secure a Spanish state loan of 53 million euros to face the situation created by the coronavirus. The company would have paid 1% for the arrangements. It is not currently proven that the Government approved that bailout in violation of the rules. This is a key fact for the development of the process.
Is this the first time a former Prime Minister has received a commission for some management in the governmental sphere? It is difficult to affirm or deny in a country where there is no specific regulation on the transparency of lobbies, which is significant in a Madrid increasingly populated by consultancies run by people with experience in professional politics.
It is the first time that suspicion falls on a former president who has shown interest in two countries, Venezuela and China, which the current cold war has considered ‘adversaries’ of the Western bloc.
Zapatero was two years old at the most tense moment of the first cold war (the Cuban missile crisis in 1962). Perhaps he never fully grasped what a world divided into two blocs means. That a company partly owned by his two daughters appears as an alleged recipient of professional commissions adds a tone of pathos to the facts described in the judicial order.
It is suspected that Zapatero may have been playing with fire in high-risk geopolitical areas. One of the 18 intelligence agencies of the United States has decoded a phone whose content puts him in the crosshairs, at a time when the United States has taken control of Venezuela and is preparing to intervene in Cuba. We are in a new phase of dividing zones of influence in the world. History teaches, but often has no students.
For the PSOE, every end of term is a drama. Soon it will be a year, in July 2025, since Santos Cerdán, the party’s secretary of organization, was arrested, accused of alleged illegal commission payments and rigging public contracts. Cerdán was placed in pretrial detention, spoke little, and today is on provisional release awaiting the conclusion of the judicial investigation. Six months later, in November 2025, on the eve of another holiday period, José Luis Ábalos, former PSOE secretary of organization (before Cerdán), former Minister of Transport, former number two of Pedro Sánchez when he presented the motion of no confidence against Mariano Rajoy in May 2018, was arrested. Ábalos is currently in prison. Six months later, at the doorstep of June 2026, the Zapatero case.
First question: Can Sánchez withstand so much adverse pressure? Zapatero is not part of the Government, nor does he hold any organic position in the PSOE, after resigning as secretary general in February 2012, fourteen years ago. However, the former president has reemerged in recent years as a reference figure of the left-leaning PSOE. He has been a great motivator of the latest socialist electoral campaigns. He did not support Sánchez in the 2017 primaries—Zapatero also backed Andalusian leader Susana Díaz—but he approached the current president when he regained party leadership and conquered the Government in 2018.
Second question: What does the Popular Party plan to do? Will Alberto Núñez Feijóo dare to present a motion of no confidence before the end of the year? “We don’t have the numbers, we are four votes short,” they respond in the Popular Party. The Populars do not want to lose a parliamentary vote related to Sánchez’s continuity. They know it is very difficult to get the support of Junts, the Basque Nationalist Party, and Vox at the same time, even with the commitment to call immediate elections. Carles Puigdemont is awaiting a ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on the application of the amnesty law, and the PNV governs in the Basque Country with the Basque PSOE and has as its main electoral adversary EH Bildu, which competes with it from the left. Until recently, Zapatero was an interlocutor of Puigdemont, whom he visited several times in Waterloo.
In Génova they fear the electronic scoreboard of Congress and surely trust that their adversary will arrive literally bloodied at the local and regional elections scheduled for May 2027. Sánchez’s room for maneuver may have shrunk considerably these days.
In 1980, May 1980, Felipe González knew how to take advantage of the constitutional mechanism of the motion of no confidence to consolidate himself as the undisputed leader of the opposition and announce the main lines of the socialists’ alternative program. Adolfo Suárez was becoming very worn out and there was saber-rattling in Spain. González knew he did not have the ‘numbers’ to win that motion, nor did he even desire to win it, but it was his great springboard. He convinced the country that a reasonable alternative existed. Núñez Feijóo seems to fear the aura of a defeated man if he presents the motion. He fears that Sánchez will consolidate the legend of a great resistor, despite the adversities accumulating against him.
The United States ambassador to Spain, Benjamín León, received the Vox leader, Santiago Abascal, at his residence yesterday. They were photographed together. There is a gesture that cannot go unnoticed. Vox cannot present a motion of no confidence in this legislature: they lack two deputies to reach the 35 signatures needed. They do not have that lever, but the American ambassador receives Abascal at a sharply critical moment for the Government. The United States has given the thumbs down.
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