PP accuses Sánchez of 'autocracy' after PSOE closes ranks at scandal-hit Federal Committee

A united front in Ferraz

Pedro Sánchez’s party used Saturday’s Comité Federal in Madrid to project unity after weeks of corruption scandals. There was no public self-criticism, and only Emiliano García-Page, the president of Castilla‑La Mancha, was noted as a lone internal dissenter. Speaker after speaker closed ranks, with portavoz Patxi López insisting that “millions” of Spaniards still back a left‑wing government.

Rebeca Torró, the new organiser, gets a boost

Much of the private discussion centred on Rebeca Torró, the secretary of organisation who replaced Santos Cerdán and José Luis Ábalos. Delegates from several regions thanked her for putting an end to a period the party leadership says it has “endured with great sorrow”. Adriana Lastra, now government delegate in Asturias, told reporters that under Torró the party is acting “with firmness” in the face of what she called “treachery” by the two former organisers. Lastra herself has said she suffered a “harassment and demolition operation” orchestrated by Cerdán and Ábalos.

“Since the arrival of the Valencian politician we have been acting with firmness.”

Torró’s standing had already recovered after a rocky start in July 2025, when one of her deputies, Francisco Salazar, was forced to resign over “improper behaviour”. She later threw herself into regional campaigns in Extremadura, Aragón, Castilla y León and Andalusia, earning praise even from former prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero before his own legal troubles.

PP slams ‘North Korean’ committee and ‘autocrat’ Sánchez

The Partido Popular’s reaction was immediate and ferocious. Secretary‑general Miguel Tellado, speaking at the PP congress in Huesca, said the Federal Committee had become a “criminal council with North Korean overtones”. He argued that “Sánchez has dissected his own party to impose a single way of thinking” and that the PSOE was now “convicted by the courts and a tame, submissive party that has decided to shut up and swallow”. Tellado counted 16 court cases and 97 indicted persons around the prime minister.

“What we saw yesterday was the closest thing to the silence of the lambs.”

Madrid president Isabel Díaz Ayuso accused Sánchez of “pure authoritarianism”, claiming he had “kidnapped his own party” and decided to “drown himself and take everyone with him”. PP national leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo compared Spain to the “American West, where the sheriff does what he wants”, and insisted that everything leads “to the pyramid, and at the top of the pyramid is P.S.”, an apparent reference to the initials that appear in the Leire Díez case.

Parliamentary pressure and calls for elections

The verbal offensive came just days after both the Congress of Deputies and the Senate approved PP motions calling on Sánchez to resign and call elections. Tellado highlighted those votes as proof that “the ‘sanchismo’ is increasingly alone in parliament and on the streets”. The PSOE, however, remains entrenched in its “resistance manual”, with minister Óscar López asserting that “thousands of men and women in this country” know that “left‑wing government is important”.

“Thousands of men and women in this country do not suck their thumbs and know that left‑wing government is important.”

What comes next

With the PSOE insisting the legislature will run until 2027 and the PP painting the government as terminally corrupted, the immediate horizon holds little prospect of cross‑party rapprochement. Ferraz is banking on the regional backing that Torró’s “closer relationship with the territories” is supposed to bring, while the opposition doubles down on a narrative of an autocratic prime minister who, in Tellado’s words, “is no longer a democrat”.