The leader of Spain’s PP party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, called for the resignation of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and early elections after the courts remanded a former socialist leader in custody for alleged bribery.

Feijóo recalled that Santos Cerdán, former secretary of the PSOE Organisation, was the person whom the Spanish prime minister and leader of the Socialists “personally ratified as number two six months ago” at the Spanish Socialist Workers” Party (PSOE) congress held in Seville.

The same person, stressed the leader of the Popular Party (PP, right), “will go to prison today without bail, accused of criminal organisation and bribery, among other charges”.

“If this does not warrant resignation and elections, it is because he no longer has any sense of reality,” he said in a message on social network X.

The Spanish Supreme Court today decided to send Santos Cerdán to preventive detention without bail for his alleged role in a bribery scheme involving alleged irregular public works contracts.

Judge Leopoldo Puente, who granted the request of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office and the prosecution, considered that the former number three of the PSOE may have committed crimes of membership in a criminal organisation, bribery and influence peddling.

Cerdán testified for the first time before the magistrate since his resignation and, in response to questions from his lawyer, denied that he or the PSOE had received bribe payments.

The defendant claimed to be the victim of political persecution for negotiating Pedro Sánchez’s investiture with the Basque nationalist parties PNV and EH Bildu, and predicted that the next target will be Minister Félix Bolaños.

On the other hand, the spokesman for the Popular Group in Congress, Miguel Tellado, recalled the messages of support for Cerdán in recent months.

“It iss all a lie, they said. They are persecuting us unfairly. It is all the fault of the mudslinging, the fascist judges, the fascist media, the fascist opposition that hates us for being progressive,” he said.

Tellado pointed out that we already know “how the story ends” and added: “It was all a farce and a ploy to cling to power.”

For the PP leader, “today ‘Sanchezism’ sleeps behind bars.”

Earlier, at a press conference, the PP secretary-general said that the Supreme Court’s decision to send Santos Cerdán to preventive detention “without bail” represents a “qualitative leap” and called on the PSOE”s partners to speak out.

“I believe it is time to know what all those who supported this government think,” said Cuca Gamarra.

For the PP, the Supreme Court’s decision “directly affects the president of the government.”

In this regard, she emphasised that this judicial decision affects the “heart of ‘Sanchezism’”because Santos Cerdán “was [Pedro Sánchez’s] right-hand man for everything,” with important negotiations such as the motion of censure that brought him to Moncloa (the seat of the executive) in 2018 and the negotiations for Sánchez to be sworn in as president of the government.

In addition, he stressed that he also led the negotiations in Switzerland with the former president of the Catalan regional government, Carles Puigdemont.

“Pedro Sánchez is and has been President Sánchez thanks to Cerdán, and Cerdán did everything he did thanks to Pedro Sánchez. And if one falls legally, the other must fall politically, because if Cerdán ends up in prison, what Pedro Sánchez must do is immediately leave Moncloa,” he argued.