After Maduro’s arrest, Spain’s Sánchez breaks out in a cold sweat

By arresting Nicolás Maduro in a flawless military operation and taking control of the political transition in Venezuela, Trump has once again struck hard and caught everyone off guard. As the world absorbs the abrupt arrival of a new geopolitical era, the debates between “legalists” and “realists” fade in the face of the fait accompli, and observers are forced to acknowledge the obvious: The EU is completely out of the game. Kallas’ statement supported by 26 Member states (Hungary refusing to sign), is a collection of platitudes and contradictory diplomatic stammering. 

Through these inaudible reactions and its attempts to reassert an order that has been shattered, the EU is acknowledging its impotence, if not its obsolescence. Europe is naked; it carries no weight. It dreamed of being a trendsetter, a benevolent regulator of a globalised world, and finds itself brutally ejected from the course of history. All that remains for it is to rearm itself, to clean house (illegal migration, security, competitiveness, energy prices), to speak the language of interests, and to ask itself the uncomfortable question: What if this “ever closer Union” is an exercise of collective castration based on the silly idea that Europe’s power comes from weakening its nations? Europe is now embarking on a long journey through the desert during which it must reinvent itself, beginning with a drastic reform of a messianic EU that has only pushed its countries toward irrelevance. On the international stage, it has nothing to say; it is therefore better for it to remain silent and let its 27 member states express themselves freely “in all their diversity”.

Especially since, with regard to Venezuela, the EU’s compass and that of the Big Coalition were pointing in the wrong direction. While everyone rushes now to condemn Maduro’s tyranny, the far Left, the Greens, the Liberals, and the Socialists refused to vote for a resolution condemning Maduro’s blatant electoral fraud in June 2024. The European Parliament eventually adopted the text through the unprecedented alliance of the EPP with all the groups to its Right, a breach of the sacrosanct cordon sanitaire that the guardians of the establishment denounced as the worst of anathemas. This precedent speaks volumes about the dogmatism and ideological blindness of the almighty coalition. 

Of course, nothing surprising from The Left group (GUE), which has always hailed Chavez and Maduro as their own, with the fanatics of La France Insoumise and Podemos leading the charge—the latter party being financed by the Caracas regime. Nor from the Greens, who are decidedly red when you scratch the surface. But there is reason to ask some questions about the European Socialists, their president Iratxe García, and, above all, the President of the Socialist International and natural leader of this political family: Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish prime minister, who must be sweating bullets since Maduro’s arrest.

For several months, Sánchez has been mired in scandals that reveal systemic corruption within his family circle, his party, and his government, as well as… ties as strong as they are sulphurous with the Maduro regime. In 2020, José Luis Ábalos, Sánchez’s second-in-command and now imprisoned, made headlines by receiving Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s right-hand, at Madrid airport. Rodríguez was banned from the Schengen Area under EU sanctions. It was an illegal and highly dubious visit: No trace of the forty suitcases Delcy left at the airport…Yet, the Spanish government managed to get her invited to the CELAC-EU Summit in Brussels in July 2023.

The second episode involved the €53 million bailout during the pandemic of an obscure Venezuelan airline with only one plane, which didn’t stop the Spanish government from deeming it a “strategic enterprise”. Who was pulling the strings? Maduro’s man in Europe, a certain José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, former Spanish Socialist president turned opaque international lobbyist, extremely close to the Chavista regime and whose personal wealth has allegedly skyrocketed in recent years. This bailout was at the heart of a money laundering investigation in France and Switzerland, which led to the detention of the company’s president and a Spanish businessman whom Zapatero had met secretly three days earlier. 

And that is only the tip of the iceberg. The Spanish press revealed that the Venezuelan government provided a luxurious flat to Zapatero in Caracas and Maduro’s former Head of Intelligence, Hugo “El Pollo” Carvajal, accused him in very concrete terms of receiving payments from the Venezuelan regime. Enough for Zapatero to be under the radar of the Trump administration and under investigation by a US federal judge. 

No one should be therefore surprised that Spain was the only European government to sign the statement issued by the left-leaning governments of Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Colombia and Mexico denouncing Maduro’s arrest. Nevertheless, behind this staunch defence of international law, there is primarily panic and a desire to save their own skin. In Spain, the fall of the Venezuelan regime is causing Pedro Sánchez considerable anxiety. In Europe, European socialists can no longer pretend to ignore the highly dangerous connections and systemic corruption of their leader.