The Noose Tightens Around Sánchez and His Circle
Begoña Gómez was in Beijing with her husband when the ruling dropped. The timing was almost operatic — Spain’s prime minister on a state visit to China, projecting statesmanship, while back home a judge signed off on four criminal charges against his wife. The image of Pedro Sánchez at Tsinghua University urging Beijing to help end wars while his domestic political foundation crumbled may be the defining photograph of his premiership.
Judge Juan Carlos Peinado, whose two-year investigation has shadowed the Sánchez government since April 2024, issued a formal charging order against Gómez dated April 11 and made public April 13. The charges are not minor: influence peddling, corruption in business dealings, misappropriation of public funds, and embezzlement. Peinado has also proposed that Gómez stand trial before a jury, alongside her aide Cristina Álvarez and businessman Juan Carlos Barrabés. The prosecution, which had previously sought dismissal, and the defense each have five days to respond before a separate judge decides whether the case proceeds to trial.
The substance of the charges centers on a university “chair” — an academic initiative Gómez co-directed at Madrid’s Complutense University. According to the ruling, the judge found that since Sánchez assumed the prime ministership in 2018, “certain public decisions” were taken that benefited this academic project. Peinado concluded that the chair “served as a means of private professional development for the person under investigation.” He also flagged Gómez’s apparent lack of formal qualifications for the post she occupied.
None of this exists in isolation. The charges against Gómez are the most prominent strand in a web of legal entanglements that now encircles the Socialist government from multiple directions. Sánchez’s brother, David Sánchez, has been separately indicted on influence-peddling allegations tied to his hiring by a regional government — a case that prompted the prime minister to accuse unnamed judges of “doing politics.” And this month, former Transport Minister José Luis Ábalos — once Sánchez’s closest political lieutenant — went to trial on allegations of kickbacks connected to public contracts for COVID-19 protective equipment.
Sánchez’s response to each development has followed the same template: dismiss the charges as a right-wing smear campaign, question the motives of the judiciary, and stay put. In April 2024, he took a theatrical five-day “period of reflection,” hinted at resignation, and then announced he would remain in office, framing his survival as a defiant act against a “mud-flinging machine” of conservative media and politicized judges. His Justice Minister called the investigation a witch hunt. His political allies lined up to defend Gómez as an innocent victim of judicial overreach.
That framing is becoming harder to sustain. The complaint against Gómez was indeed filed by Manos Limpias, an anti-corruption group with documented far-right connections. But the investigation that followed was conducted over two years by a sitting judge, who has now concluded there is sufficient evidence of criminal conduct to send the matter to trial. The mechanism that produced this outcome is the ordinary Spanish judicial process, not a political conspiracy.
What the Sánchez government faces is a structural problem: it leads a fragile minority coalition dependent on parliamentary support from parties that have little appetite for absorbing indefinite legal scandal. General elections are due next year. Each new legal development gives the opposition — and crucially, potential coalition defectors — fresh grounds to call for accountability. The corruption charges against Gómez, coming on top of the Ábalos trial and the David Sánchez indictment, represent a cumulative weight that political triangulation alone cannot neutralize.
Sánchez built his tenure on the argument that the Spanish right poses an existential threat to democracy. That argument may yet have electoral life — his party has reportedly seen a modest polling uptick amid anti-Trump sentiment in Europe. But the corruption narrative now runs in parallel, and it is grounded in court filings, not opposition talking points. A prime minister can survive a smear campaign. Surviving four criminal charges against his wife, a brother’s indictment, and a former cabinet minister’s corruption trial simultaneously requires something more durable than righteous indignation.
The question is whether the Spanish political system gives him enough runway to find it.