Why can Sánchez resist?

"Since the harsh attacks on the PSOE leader didn't finish him off, we saw it was necessary to go to the limit and put the state at risk in order to finish him off." This confession from a conservative journalist could be attributed to one of Pedro Sánchez's many enemies. However, this harassment and demolition operation is three decades old and took place during Felipe González's last term. Its promoters had a resounding slogan: "Go away, Mr. González" and an infallible pretext: "Defend threatened freedom of expression." And the truth is that the scandals that rocked socialism back then would make the current ones pale in comparison.

Between 1989 and 1993 alone—the last elections won by González—the Vice President of the Government, Alfonso Guerra, resigned over the transfer of an official office to his brother, and the Minister of Health resigned over alleged planning irregularities during his time at the helm of Renfe, for which he was only acquitted many years later. At the same time, the Filesa case of illegal financing of the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party) and the fraud in the Official State Gazette (BOE), whose director, the socialist Carmen Salanueva, ended up in prison, erupted. Likewise, the governor of the Bank of Spain (nominated by González himself) was forced to resign for stock market speculation.

A declared media conspiracy only amplified socialist corruption for a decade, but failed to crush the PSOE in 1996.

And despite everything—and in a context of economic crisis and skyrocketing unemployment—the PSOE unexpectedly won the 1993 elections. It obtained four points more than the Popular Party and almost twenty more seats. In fact, its electoral support suffered a very slight erosion: the Socialists obtained the support of nearly 30% of the electorate, just one point less than in the 1986 elections, when they won with an absolute majority.

In reality, the most significant effect of the scandals affecting the PSOE was the galvanization of the center-right vote around the PP. The Popular Party captured all the votes lost to centrists and wrested a million votes from abstention and new voters. They achieved this despite also being burdened with their own burden of illegal financing—the Naseiro case—which failed because the Supreme Court dismissed the recordings (no less shameful than those of Koldo and Ábalos) submitted by the investigating judge.

What's truly surprising, in terms of comparison with the current situation, is what happened in the following term. During that period, the former director of the Civil Guard, Luis Roldán, fled the country. He was accused of corruption and was on the verge of being appointed Interior Minister by González. As a result, the minister responsible had to resign, although the Minister of Agriculture also resigned a month later due to tax irregularities. And it wouldn't be the last. A year later, Vice President Serra and the Minister of Defense resigned due to the illegal wiretapping by the Cesid (Center for the Protection of the Interior).

The Great Recession of 2008 and the emergence of new acronyms due to generational change caused the most irreversible damage to the Socialist Party.

During that same period, the former governor of the Bank of Spain was imprisoned, the president of the Red Cross, Socialist Carmen Mestre, resigned for leading the institution to ruin, and the Interior Ministry's secret funds case erupted. As if that weren't enough, the investigation into the dirty war against ETA was reopened, and three months before the elections, the former Socialist president of Navarre was imprisoned for taking commissions.

Well, the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party) ended in a technical tie with the PP in the 1996 elections despite running the same leader as its candidate—the mysterious "Mr. X"—who had governed during that grim period and who constantly learned about the scandals affecting his party through the press. In fact, the Socialist electoral base held firm: it only lost half a point in voter turnout compared to 1993. However, the PP mobilized a million and a half more voters in its favor than three years earlier. And the rest is a familiar story. The right's glaring errors and the renewal of the Socialist leadership returned the PSOE to power eight years later, with support surpassed only by the 1982 elections.

The PSOE's base is no longer what it was two decades ago, but it may be more loyal in a polarized atmosphere and could grow at the expense of the useful left-wing vote.

In reality, it was the handling of the 2008 economic crisis that irrevocably sank socialism, which was on the verge of being overtaken in 2015 by the new leftist formations born in the heat of the system's exhaustion. And although Pedro Sánchez managed to regain progressive leadership and avoid the irrelevance into which other social democratic parties have fallen, the PSOE failed to recover more than three and a half million lost votes. That said, although smaller, perhaps the socialist core is stronger today.

And now what? Predicting is always difficult. Especially predicting the future. Until the outbreak of the Cerdán case, and waiting for what the inscrutable future might hold, the PSOE's potential base seemed destined to resist and even grow moderately at the expense of political polarization and the Cainite crisis that is bleeding the radical left dry. Has that expectation been definitively dashed, even if Sánchez ultimately manages to contain the magnitude of the destruction? The current prospects for socialism are bleak, but if González managed to maintain support for the PSOE amid an almost universal deluge of scandals, why couldn't Sánchez do so if he wasn't hit by new cases—although the Popular Party opposition was—and continued to boast an infinitely better economic situation than in the first half of the 1990s?