Walter Finch
SPANISH Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s dramatic faux-resignation gambit appears to have paid dividends.
Spain’s Socialist Party (PSOE) has seen their support rise by nearly 10 points since Sanchez announced last week he would ‘stop and reflect’ on whether he wanted to continue in his role.
This is according to a recent flash survey conducted on Friday, two days after the announcement.
Sanchez broke the tension this morning during a press conference in which the socialist PSOE leader revealed he has decided to remain as Spain’s prime minister.
PSOE now sits at 38.6% of the vote, while the People’s Party (PP) lag 9.4 points behind with 29.2% of voter intentions.
The far-right Vox party is predicted to come in third with 11% of the vote, followed by Sumar at 7.2%. When combining the votes of PP and Vox, the total reaches 40.2%, which still trails the 45.8% held by the governing coalition of PSOE and Sumar.
The survey was conducted just two days after Sanchez’s open letter in which he denounced harassment from the far right and considered resigning.
Sanchez penned his letter just hours after a Spanish court said it was filing a case against Sanchez’s wife, Begoña Gomez, over allegations of ‘influence peddling’.
The case was brought by a far-right pseudo-union called Manos Limpias (Clean Hands), and has prompted an inquiry into Gomez’s links to private companies that either secured government funding or public contracts.
In his letter, Sanchez claimed that the accusations were ‘baseless’ and formed part of a personal smear campaign from the ‘right and far-right’ who had sought to delegitimise his coalition government.
Thousands of people came out onto the streets of Madrid on Saturday to voice their support for the politician ahead of his expected announcement on whether he would continue.
READ MORE: Spain’s Prosecutor’s Office calls for investigation into Pedro Sanchez’s wife to be scrapped
During his speech today, Sanchez said he and his family had suffered such attacks ‘for the past 10 years’, and that they know ‘they will not stop’.
He said: “My wife and I know that this campaign to discredit us will not stop, but we can confront it.”
He added that the massive support shown over the weekend had ‘influenced’ his decision.
Thousands of people had lined the streets of Madrid on Sunday to show their support for the PM.
Sanchez last week branded the accusations against his wife an attack from right and far right forces and said he no longer knew whether being the PM is ‘worth it’.
In his speech today, he said leading the government was ‘not worth it’ if ‘we allow deliberate fake news to direct the political debate, if we force the victims of these lies to prove their innocence, if we allow the role of women to be relegated to the domestic sphere once again, having to sacrifice their professional careers for the benefit of their husband.”
He branded the complaints against his wife as ‘baseless’, insisting that they were only filed as an attempt to ‘deligitimise’ his role as prime minister.
He wrote: “In short, it is an operation of harassment and demolition by land, sea and air, to try and weaken me politically and personally by attacking my wife.
“I’m not naive. I am aware that they are denouncing Begoña not because she has done something illegal, they know there is no case, but because she is my wife.
“As I am also fully aware that the attacks I suffer are not against me but rather against what I represent: a progressive political option, supported election after election by millions of Spaniards, based on economic progress, social justice and democratic regeneration.”
