Spain’s Real Crisis Is a Leadership Void, Analysts Say

But while the charge may be simple enough, the case is not. Having previously withheld information from the courts about secret Swiss accounts, the former treasurer, Luis Bárcenas, who now sits in prison, seems less than fully credible, and the courts incapable of digging to the bottom on the matter with real speed.

The result is less a crisis for Mr. Rajoy — though he is certainly damaged, polls show — than one for Spain, its national morale and the credibility of its institutions, with all the risk that the steady drumbeat of allegations will deny recession-hit Spain strong leadership and distract the government from pressing economic concerns as the scandal unspools for years, analysts say.

In fact, Mr. Rajoy’s best defense may be to stonewall and string out the corruption case beyond the end of his scheduled mandate in 2015 and the next election. Given Spain’s overburdened courts, that should not be hard to do.

“Rajoy is the ultimate resistance fighter and he has clearly decided that time will play in his government’s favor,” said José Ignacio Torreblanca, a political columnist and head of the Spanish office of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a research group.

Still, Mr. Torreblanca suggested that Mr. Rajoy was making “a big mistake” if he resorted to stalling tactics in an attempt to keep political pressure at a minimum.

“A prime minister should not only ask people to trust him but instead present a credible story about exactly what happened when faced with such accusations,” Mr. Torreblanca said.

This week, however, the Popular Party rejected a call from opposition parties for Mr. Rajoy to appear in Parliament and explain exactly how the party’s finances had been managed by Mr. Bárcenas. Meanwhile, prosecutors started naming senior Popular Party officials whom they want to appear as witnesses in the case, led by María Dolores de Cospedal, the secretary general of the party.

Mr. Bárcenas was first subpoenaed in 2009, as part of what then appeared to be a mundane graft investigation into whether a group of businessmen had bribes to receive contracts from conservative mayors and regional politicians. He denied at the time ever having had money in Switzerland.

Since January, investigators have unearthed at least €47 million, or $61.4 million, that he allegedly stashed offshore, in Switzerland but also possibly in the United States and other countries. Mr. Bárcenas is next scheduled in court on Monday, and with each appearance speculation mounts that he will turn on his former party colleagues, as they turn on him.

Mr. Bárcenas reportedly left his job as treasurer in 2009 with a trove of documents. This week, the newspaper El Mundo published ledgers that it claimed were the party’s parallel financial accounts, mirroring allegations made in late January by another Spanish paper, El País.

Mr. Bárcenas is being held in a prison outside Madrid since a court judged him to be a flight risk in June. After visiting his friend on Monday, Miguel Duran, a lawyer, told RAC1 radio that Mr. Bárcenas had told him “interesting things.”

“He has enough information to make the government fall,” Mr. Duran said ominously.

Mr. Rajoy and other senior party officials have denied wrongdoing, as has Mr. Bárcenas. Increasingly the scandal boils down to their word against his. Senior party officials have now sought to isolate and even disparage their former colleague, at the risk that Mr. Bárcenas will become even looser with his years of accumulated knowledge of the inner workings of the Popular Party.

By Thursday, Mr. Bárcenas was being called “a delinquent” by Alfonso Alonso, the party’s parliamentary spokesman, “for whom lying has become a way of life.” At the same time, Mr. Alonso acknowledged that “there has been a corruption ring, which is what we want the judiciary to clarify.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/13/world/europe/spains-real-crisis-is-a-leadership-void-analysts-say.html?partner=rss&emc=rss