Just four months into its second term, Spain’s Socialist-led government is already mired in corruption allegations. The latest scandal emerged this week and focuses on the wife of prime minister Pedro Sanchez, Begoña Gómez.

Gomez is alleged to have had secret meetings with the management of Air Europa, Spain’s third largest airline, in late 2020, just before it was bailed out with a €475 million aid package by her husband’s leftist government.

The Conservative Popular party (PP) has wasted no time in capitalising on this. Eloy Suarez Lamata, a PP representative in Spain’s upper house, claimed that the allegations against Gomez ‘would have brought down’ any other president in Europe ‘because Caesar’s wife cannot have commercial relations with the companies that Caesar rescues. That is called state corruption’.

PP leader Alberto Feijoo has already announced his intention to launch a judicial investigation into corruption allegations affecting Sanchez’s government. During Wednesday’s tense parliamentary session, Feijoo reminded Sanchez that t Socialist leader that he himself came to power in 2018 after winning a no-confidence vote against a Conservative government that was, at the time, the focal point of a massive fraud investigation (the so-called Gurtel case). The PP has so far stopped short of taking the same action against Sanchez, who scraped back into power last November on the back of a wildly unpopular amnesty deal with Catalan separatists. Yet it can’t – and shouldn’t – be long before Feijoo tables a no-confidence vote against Sanchez’s floundering coalition.

Sanchez responded to Feijoo’s challenge with a strategy that has become standard in the polarised, insult-driven world of Spanish politics: he simply hurled accusations of corruption back at the PP leader. These allegations, though, don’t concern Feijoo himself. Instead, they centre on the husband of the Conservative president of Madrid, Isabel Ayuso, who has emerged as Sanchez’s most strident critic over the last few years.

Healthcare executive Alberto Gonzalez Amador, Ayuso’s partner since 2021, is said to be under investigation by Spanish tax authorities for illicit enrichment during the pandemic. Amador is alleged to have defrauded the Spanish Treasury of €350,000 between 2020 and 2021. Sanchez has called for Ayuso’s resignation over the Amador affair, although no evidence of wrongdoing has yet been uncovered against him. Ayuso claims her partner is being ‘besieged’ by ‘all the powers of the state’.

Mutual antagonism is well-established between Sanchez and Ayuso. Ayuso was the only politician in Spain to blast the government’s authoritarian, economically-ruinous response to Covid. Last November, the Madrid president was seen on camera calling Sanchez hijo de puta (‘son of a b****’), when the PSOE leader referred to suspicions of impropriety centred on her brother, Tomas Diaz Ayuso, that emerged in early 2022. Like Amador, Diaz Ayuso was also suspected of benefiting during the pandemic, in his case off the back of a contract to supply face masks to the regional government run by his sister.

Yet it was not Sanchez nor any other member of the leftist government who hit the Madrid premier with the allegations against Amador’s brother – it was Pablo Casado, at that time the PP’s leader. Casado underestimated Ayuso’s popularity and ended up having to resign himself. It has yet to be proved that there was anything illegal about the face mask contract given to Ayuso’s brother.

Sanchez is calling for Ayuso’s resignation for the same reason that Casado wanted her gone two years ago: she is a threat. Charismatic, outspoken and hugely popular in Madrid, she is tipped as a future PP leader (and would be much more effective in the role than either Casado or Feijoo have been).

Sanchez’s hypocrisy in demanding her departure is remarkable, even by the lowly standards of Spanish politics – because his own party is also entangled in a Covid-related scandal. The so-called Koldo case centres on Koldo Garcia, formerly an advisor to the Socialists’ ex-transport minister Jose Luis Abalos. Koldo was arrested by the Guardia Civil last month, suspected of brokering fraudulent face mask contracts while working for Abalos.

As damaging as the accusations against Sanchez’s wife and the Koldo case are for Spain’s leftist government, they are not the only reasons why the Conservatives should table a no-confidence vote. The amnesty deal by which Sanchez returned to power is loathed by the majority of Spaniards and has caused protests all over the country. The PP, the Spanish judiciary, the EU and even elements of Sanchez’s own party have expressed concerns about its potential erosion of the rule of law. Yet despite being reinstalled at such a heavy cost, the Socialist-led coalition is effectively impotent, unable even to pass a budget for this year. The recent corruption allegations merely deal a fatal blow to a government that shouldn’t be here in the first place.