MADRID (Reuters) -Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez named four people to take over the leadership of his Socialist party on Monday as he sought to contain the damage from a corruption inquiry that threatens the survival of his fragile minority government.
Sanchez named the team to replace Santos Cerdan, who stepped down after a Supreme Court judge called him to testify over accusations in a police report that he discussed taking payments in exchange for awarding public works contracts.
Cerdan, who was no. 3 in the party’s hierarchy, coordinating between different regions as its organisational secretary, has said he will testify to prove his innocence.
“We are not perfect, but we are uncompromising when it comes to corruption,” Sanchez said in a press conference in Madrid.
The new team will remain in place until July 5, when the Socialists will hold a party congress where a permanent replacement for Cerdan will be named, Sanchez said.
Last week, Sanchez resisted calls for a snap election after the allegations emerged, instead promising an overhaul of the party and an external audit of its accounts.
However, even some allies have raised concerns that those measures were insufficient to restore public trust for a party that came to power in 2018 after a no-confidence vote ejected then-Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy of the People’s Party when it was embroiled in the biggest corruption probe in Spain’s democratic history.
A number of senior Socialist figures have called for an extraordinary party congress, while a former regional leader suggested Sanchez should call a snap election.
Sanchez will on Monday evening kick off a series of meetings with coalition partners and informal allies, starting with Labour Minister Yolanda Diaz, of the junior coalition partner Sumar, who on Friday said that Sanchez’s pleas for forgiveness over the probe were not enough and called for a “reset” of the government.
However, with Sumar’s support in the opinion polls having slipped, she is unlikely to pull the plug on the coalition and risk an election.
That position is similar to that of other allies who support the government and would fear that any confidence motion or fresh election might usher in the far-right Vox party as coalition partners to the conservative PP.
(Reporting by Charlie Devereux and David Latona; additional reporting by Emma Pinedo; Editing by Aislinn Laing and Alison Williams)
