MADRID (AP) — Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez was reelected as secretary-general of his Socialist Party over the weekend despite corruption probes besetting his inner circle.
One of Europe’s longest-serving leaders, Sánchez has displayed adroit negotiating skills to stay in power since 2018, when he led Spain's only successful no-confidence motion against his conservative predecessor. Last year he defied polls to win reelection by stitching together a fragile coalition and earning another term through 2027.
But the 52-year-old Sánchez, known abroad for his dashing looks and English fluency, is being corralled by a series of legal cases — all still in the investigative phase — that have focused on a former member of his Cabinet as well as his wife and, most recently, his brother.
Here's a look at the judicial onslaught that Sánchez and his party say is baseless and part of a right-wing “smear campaign."
Sánchez stunned Spain last April when he said he was taking five days from his public agenda to consider his political future after his wife, Begoña Gómez, had been placed under investigation by a Spanish judge.
He eventually announced he would stay in power and launch an effort to tackle what he called fake news that is “mudding” Spanish politics.
The judge is probing allegations of influence peddling and corruption by Gómez. The allegations were made by Manos Limpias (Clean Hands), a small group whose leader has links to the far-right. The group calls itself a union and has often tried to litigate against elected officials, and even against the sister of the current king of Spain.
The Socialist Party pounced on the fact that the allegations were based on articles published by media, mostly websites, with right-wing leanings.
Sánchez refused to answer questions when he was summoned by the judge, citing his prerogative as prime minister.
Gómez has also been dragged before a committee led by regional lawmakers in the Madrid region who say they are looking into her role as the director of a master’s program at a public university. She denies any wrongdoing.
Also under investigation is the prime minister's brother, David Sánchez. In that case, too, Manos Limpias was behind the accusations of alleged influence peddling.
Last week, a judge announced she was investigating how David Sánchez was named to his post in the Department of Culture in the Badajoz provincial government in southwest Spain. David Sánchez denied any wrongdoing through his lawyer.
Government spokeswoman Pilar Alegría said last week that while the government respects the separation of powers and the judicial processes, she found “suspicious similarities” between the cases involving the prime minister’s wife and brother.
“We are at ease because we know there is nothing to these cases," she said.
Another case that has been on slow boil for several months revolves around an alleged corruption ring of business people and government officials suspected of having taken kickbacks for contracts to buy medical supplies during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The scandal led to the Socialist Party expelling a former transport minister, Luis Ábalos, who had been a close confidant to Sánchez until he reshuffled his Cabinet in 2021 before the scandal broke. Ábalos denies any wrongdoing and has clung to his seat in parliament, now as an independent lawmaker.
A tax evasion case against the partner of a fierce political rival of Sánchez, the conservative leader of the powerful Madrid region, has also ended up backfiring politically for the Socialists.
The businessman boyfriend of Isabel Díaz Ayuso, a firebrand Popular Party politician in charge of the central Madrid region, is being investigated for not paying his fair share in taxes.
But he hit back accusing state prosecutors of having violated his right to privacy for having leaked confidential financial and personal details. A court took up the complaint and is targeting Spain’s top state prosecutor, who was put in his position by Sánchez’s government. The top state prosecutor has defended his actions.
Last week, things got worse for the Socialists when their top politician in the Madrid region stepped down after he was implicated in the possible revelation of personal information.
Still, Sánchez appears to have — at least for now — the political coverage he needs to remain in charge.
He maintains the support of several regional parties that have kept his coalition between his Socialists and the farther-to-the-left Sumar party muddling along.
Also helping his longevity is the fact that the only alternative to his leadership is a right-wing coalition between the Popular Party and the far-right Vox party, a prospect that is anathema to some regional parties whose support was key to Sánchez's victory last year.
At the meeting of his Socialist Party, Sánchez urged optimism and hit back against his opponents: “Let the right be the ones with regrets and the ashy gray of pessimism.”
Wilson reported from Barcelona.
FILE - Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez grimaces during a press conference after meeting with Slovenia's Prime Minister Robert Golob, in Ljubljana, Slovenia, Tuesday, April 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic, File)
The possibility of the U.S. outlawing TikTok kept influencers and users in anxious limbo during the four-plus years that lawmakers and judges debated the fate of the video-sharing app. Now, the moment its fans dreaded is here, but uncertainty over TikTok’s future lingers.
On Friday, a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court ended a legal battle that pitted national security concerns against free speech rights. TikTok, ByteDance and some of the devoted users who rely on the platform for entertainment, income and community argued the statute violated the First Amendment. The Biden administration sought to show ByteDance’s ownership and control of TikTok posed an unacceptable threat.
TikTok’s app was removed from prominent app stores on Saturday just hours before a federal ban on the popular social media platform was scheduled to go into effect.
Trump, who is set to return to the White House the day after the ban takes effect, has credited TikTok with helping him win the support of more young voters in last year’s election. A Trump adviser said this week that the incoming administration would “put measures in place to keep TikTok from going dark.” What those measures will look like — and if they can withstand legal scrutiny — remained unknown Saturday.
Here’s a look at how TikTok became a global cultural phenomenon and the political wrangling that followed the app's commercial success:
TikTok is one of more than 100 apps developed in the past decade by ByteDance, a technology firm founded in 2012 by Chinese entrepreneur Zhang Yiming and headquartered in Beijing’s northwestern Haidian district.
In 2016, ByteDance launched a short-form video platform called Douyin in China and followed up with an international version called TikTok. It then bought Musical.ly, a lip-syncing platform popular with teens in the U.S. and Europe, and combined it with TikTok while keeping the app separate from Douyin.
Soon after, the app boomed in popularity in the U.S. and many other countries, becoming the first Chinese platform to make serious inroads in the West. Unlike other social media platforms that focused on cultivating connections among users, TikTok tailored content to people’s interests.
The often silly videos and music clips content creators posted gave TikTok an image as a sunny corner of the internet where users could find fun and a sense of authenticity. Finding an audience on the platform helped launch the careers of music artists like Lil Nas X.
TikTok gained more traction during the shutdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic, when short dances that went viral became a mainstay of the app. To better compete, Instagram and YouTube eventually came out with their own tools for making short-form videos, respectively known as Reels and Shorts. By that point, TikTok was a bona fide hit.
Challenges came in tandem with TikTok’s success. U.S. officials expressed concerns about the company’s roots and ownership, pointing to laws in China that require Chinese companies to hand over data requested by the government. Another concern became the proprietary algorithm that populates what users see on the app.
During his first term in office, Trump issued executive orders in 2020 banning TikTok and the Chinese messaging app WeChat, moves that courts subsequently blocked. India banned TikTok — along with other Chinese apps — the same year following a military clash along the India-China border that killed 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers.
In 2021, the Biden administration dropped the Trump-era orders but left in place a national security review of TikTok by a little-known government agency known as Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS.
Between January 2021 and August 2022, representatives for TikTok engaged in serious negotiations with the Biden administration about the app’s future in the U.S. The talks resulted in a 90-page draft security agreement that the company presented to CFIUS in August 2022. The two sides then ceased substantive negotiations, according to TikTok’s attorneys, though some meetings also took place in following months.
A copy of the draft agreement submitted in court showed that it would have opened up TikTok’s U.S. platform for security inspections and blocked access of U.S. user data from China. The company says it has already implemented some provisions of the agreement, including routing U.S. user data to servers operated by software giant Oracle.
In its lawsuit to overturn the sell-or-ban law, the company said it spent more than $2 billion to implement aspects of its appeasement plan, which it calls Project Texas.
But the Department of Justice and administration officials argued in court documents that the proposal failed to create sufficient separation between TikTok's U.S. operations and China. They also said the opacity of TikTok’s algorithm, coupled with the size and technical complexity of the platform, made it impossible for the U.S. government – or TikTok's technology provider, Oracle – to effectively guarantee compliance with the proposal.
In February 2023, the White House directed federal agencies to remove TikTok from government-issued devices, mirroring some other countries that also prohibited the use of the app on official devices.
The following month, lawmakers grilled TikTok CEO Shou Chew during an hours-long hearing in which he sought to reassure a tense House committee that the platform prioritized user safety and should not be banned due to its Chinese connections.
According to court documents, TikTok’s representatives had their last meeting with CFIUS in September 2023. Later that year, criticism against the platform increased in volume among Republicans in Washington who claimed the platform amplified pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel content, an accusation the company vigorously denied.
Efforts to ban TikTok resurfaced in Congress early last year, and quickly gained bipartisan support among lawmakers who voiced about the potential for the platform to surveil and manipulate Americans.
The legislation the Supreme Court upheld passed the House and the Senate in April after it was included as part of a high-priority $95 billion package that provided foreign aid to Ukraine and Israel. President Joe Biden quickly signed it, and the two companies and a group of content creators quickly sued.
A lower court upheld the statute in early December. The legislation gave ByteDance nine months from the enactment date to sell TikTok, and a possible three-month extension if a sale was in progress.
The deadline's arrival the day before Trump’s inauguration makes things tricky. Only the sitting president can issue a 90-day stay on the ban and can do so only if a buyer has taken concrete steps toward a purchase.
TikTok users in the United States ultimately were not able to watch videos on the popular social media platform on the evening of Jan. 18, just hours before the ban was set to take effect. The company’s app was removed from prominent app stores while its website told users that the short-form video platform was no longer available.
The TikTok app logo is shown on an iPhone on Friday, Jan. 17, 2025, in Houston. (AP Photo/Ashley Landis)
The logo for TikTok is displayed on a mobile phone, Friday, Jan. 17, 2025, in Denver. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
A TikTok logo is shown on a phone in San Francisco, Friday, Jan. 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
FILE - People work inside the TikTok Inc. building in Culver City, Calif., on March 11, 2024. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes, File)
