There is a particular kind of silence that follows the opening of a safe. Not the click of the dial, not the soft give of the door, but the pause afterward, when the people in the room understand that what they are looking at will not fit the story they were told. On the 19th of May, in an office belonging to a former prime minister of Spain, that silence arrived. Inside the safe were necklaces, bracelets, rings and watches. An expert later put the figure at 1,323,915 euros.
I have written before about the rot in Spanish public life, and I will write about it again, because it keeps arriving in instalments. But this instalment is special. This one belongs to José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the man the European left spent two decades canonising. The pacifist. The feminist. The friend of the dispossessed. The smiling face of a kinder, gentler socialism. And now, a safe full of jewels with no paper to explain them.
I do not like the Spanish left. I have never liked them. I want to be honest about that before I write another word, because honesty is the one thing this story has been missing from every side.
The safe in the office
The jewels were not the reason the police came. They were found in passing, during a search tied to something else entirely, and that is what makes the moment so revealing. A man does not get to rehearse for the discovery he did not expect.
The investigating judge at the Audiencia Nacional, Spain’s central criminal court, looked at the haul and reached the obvious conclusion: jewellery of that value generates tax obligations. VAT. Transfer tax. Inheritance and gift tax. Income tax. Something, somewhere, should have been declared and paid. When the judge could find no trail, no invoices, no customs paperwork, no record of the duties owed on goods of this worth, he opened a fresh investigation into possible tax fraud and smuggling. As reporting in The Local laid out, the suspicion is plain: assets like these do not simply appear, untaxed and untraceable, in a former leader’s safe.
Then came the part that no scriptwriter would dare invent. A spokesman for Zapatero first valued the collection at perhaps 30,000 to 50,000 euros. The official appraisal came back more than twenty-five times higher. The spokesman apologised for misleading people, said it had not been intentional, and explained that some pieces were inherited and others had simply been picked up on trips. Picked up on trips. As if a million euros in gold and stones were a fridge magnet from the airport.
Zapatero denies any wrongdoing. He is due before the judge this coming week, and he is entitled to the presumption of innocence like any other citizen, which is more grace than his movement has historically extended to its enemies. He has said that all his activity, public and private, was always conducted with absolute respect for the law. We will see what the trail says. Trails, unlike politicians, rarely apologise.
The bailout behind the door
To understand why the police were there at all, you have to go back to the airline.
In 2021, in the thick of the pandemic, a small and frankly obscure carrier called Plus Ultra received 53 million euros of public money. It came from a ten-billion-euro fund that Pedro Sánchez’s government had set up to rescue companies deemed strategic to the nation. Whatever Plus Ultra was, it was not strategic to anything except, perhaps, the people who arranged its rescue.
Zapatero stands accused of presiding over what investigators describe as a structure of influence-peddling, an apparatus whose purpose was to extract economic benefit by leaning on public bodies on behalf of others, chiefly the airline. He has called the accusation false and insisted he never lifted a finger for the rescue. The jewels were found inside that larger inquiry. One door opened, and behind it was a second door, and behind that, a safe.
This is how it usually goes. The original crime is rarely the most interesting thing. It is the housekeeping that betrays them.
The saint and the syndicate
Here is what the canonisers never want to discuss. Zapatero is not an aberration. He is a chapter.
The government of his socialist successor, Pedro Sánchez, is fighting a war on so many legal fronts that Spanish newspapers have taken to numbering the cases. There is José Luis Ábalos, once Sánchez’s transport minister and one of his closest men, expelled from the party, held in pre-trial detention, with prosecutors reportedly seeking decades in prison over pandemic-era contracts. There is his former adviser Koldo García, the burly fixer who gave the whole affair its nickname. There is Santos Cerdán, until recently the party’s number three, also sent to prison while his case proceeds. There is the search of the PSOE’s own Madrid headquarters in May, with crowds outside chanting the Spanish word for thieves. There is the prime minister’s wife, Begoña Gómez, prosecuted over alleged embezzlement and influence-peddling, and his brother, David Sánchez, on trial over a provincial job that prosecutors say was tailored for him. There is even a former attorney general found guilty of leaking secrets. Euronews, trying to keep score, counted nine separate cases closing in on the man at the top.
Every one of these figures denies wrongdoing. Every one is entitled to his day in court. But step back from the individual denials and look at the shape of the thing. This is not one bad apple. This is the orchard.
And yet the brand survives. The Spanish left still markets itself, at home and across Europe, as the conscience of the continent: anti-fascist, anti-corruption, the eternal good guys standing watch against the return of darkness. The jewels in the safe are not just a legal problem for one man. They are a crack in the costume.
An old quarrel
I told you I would be honest, so let me go further back than the safe, further back than the airline, to the thing that sits underneath my distrust of these people. It is not partisan reflex. It is memory.
In the Spanish Civil War, the left has been allowed, for ninety years, to wear the white hat. The Republic was the victim. Franco was the monster. And Franco was a monster. I will not trivialise the man or his repression, which was vast, systematic, and continued long after the guns fell silent. The historian Paul Preston did not call his book The Spanish Holocaust for nothing, and the bodies in the ditches of the Nationalist advance are real bodies. None of what follows erases them.
But the other half of the ledger has been quietly closed for two generations. During what is now called the Red Terror, the Republican zones executed tens of thousands of people without trial. Serious historians put the toll somewhere around fifty thousand. Among the dead were nearly seven thousand Catholic clergy, killed for the crime of wearing a cassock. Convents were burned. Churches were torched. At Paracuellos, outside Madrid, in the autumn of 1936, prisoners were loaded onto trucks with the promise of freedom and shot in fields by the thousand. People were murdered for the act of attending Mass.
As a Catholic, I do not say this lightly, and I do not say it to score a point. I say it because the silence around these crimes is itself a kind of crime. A whole tradition of European memory has decided that the left’s victims do not count, that anti-clerical slaughter is an awkward footnote, that to mention it at all is to side with the General. That is not history. That is propaganda wearing history’s coat.
So when I am told that the people who now keep a million euros of untaxed jewellery in a safe are the moral heirs of the men who stood against darkness, I remember the men in the trucks. I remember who emptied the churches. And I decline the invitation to be lectured.
What the safe is really telling us
You may ask why a man who advises people on freedom and money should care about a Spanish judge and an old war. Here is why.
The political class that calls itself your protector is, with remarkable consistency, helping itself. They write the tax codes and keep the jewels untaxed. They build the rescue funds and steer them to friends. They wave the banner of equality from the steps of buildings that, when searched, turn out to be full of evidence. And they have learned that the surest way to keep the rest of us obedient is to control the story: who were the heroes, who were the villains, what may be remembered and what must be forgotten.
A safe full of unexplained gold is a small thing next to a mass grave. I know that. But they are the same instinct at two different scales. Take, and then control the narrative about the taking. That is the throughline from Paracuellos to Plus Ultra, and it is why I will never hand my trust, or my freedom, or my family’s future to a state run by people who believe their cause sanctifies whatever their hands are doing.
Zapatero will have his hearing. The jewels will be weighed, in every sense. Maybe there are receipts. Maybe there is an aunt with extraordinary taste. But the saint has been photographed walking up the courthouse steps, and the halo is not where it used to be.
Believe the trail. It is the one thing in this story that has never learned to apologise.
Andere reden. Wir setzen es um.
