page_title: 2017 vote of no confidence in the government of Mariano Rajoy
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: 2017 vote of no confidence in the government of Mariano Rajoy / Background
caption_attribution_description: Comité de Dirección Regional
context_page_description: A motion of no confidence in the Spanish government of Mariano Rajoy was debated and voted in the Congress of Deputies between 13 and 14 June 2017. It was brought by Unidos Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias as a result of a corruption case involving high-ranking People's Party officials, amid accusations of maneuvers from the Rajoy government to influence the judicial system in order to cover-up the scandal. This was the third vote of no confidence held in Spain since the country's transition to democracy—after the unsuccessful 1980 and 1987 ones—as well as the first not to be registered by the main opposition party at the time. The Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, Citizens and the Basque Nationalist Party announced their rejection to any candidate proposed by Podemos, meaning that the motion was unlikely to succeed.
context_section_description: Rajoy's second government was sworn into office on 31 October 2016, after a ten-month political deadlock, two general elections and the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party's (PSOE) ultimate decision not to block Mariano Rajoy's investiture bid following an internal crisis that had led to Pedro Sánchez's resignation as party leader. However, the resulting government was a minority one, and throughout the ensuing months it struggled to get its bills passed into law. Furthermore, the ruling People's Party (PP) came under increasing political pressure after a corruption scandal in Murcia had forced the resignation of regional president Pedro Antonio Sánchez.
  In April 2017, after only five months into its term, the PP was shaken by a succession of events that damaged the party's image. Just as prime minister Rajoy was called to testify as witness at the Gürtel graft trial, a new case of alleged corruption was unveiled (dubbed as "Lezo"), joining the already ongoing investigations into the Púnica and Gürtel scandals. Operation Lezo resulted in the arrest of former Madrilenian president Ignacio González, who was accused of diverting millions of euros from the public treasury into tax havens and to pay off the regional party's debts during his tenure as Madrid premier. The scope of the new scandal reached heights never seen in Spanish politics. Several companies—namely OHL, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Indra and Canal de Isabel II, among others—suspect of having illegally financed the PP's Madrilenian branch, had their headquarters in Spain registered by the police in search of incriminating documentation. Party veteran and former González's boss Esperanza Aguirre resigned from her remaining political offices after seeing many of her former close advisers imprisoned or indicted in a number of judicial procedures.
  The leaking of a series of recordings that involved González and various high-ranking PP and government officials—including former Valencian president Eduardo Zaplana and justice minister Rafael Catalá—unveiled a plot from the interior and justice ministries to cover-up the scandal, seriously putting judicial independence in Spain into question. In one of the leaked recordings, González pointed to a tape that would allegedly show Rajoy receiving bribes from a businessman, and that this would have been used by Intereconomía CEO Julio Ariza in the past to blackmail him. Concurrently, the anti-corruption chief prosecutor, Manuel Moix—revealed by police wiretaps to have been favoured for the job by Ignacio González himself—was accused of trying to stop investigations into the PP graft accusations. Secretary of State for Security José Antonio Nieto—Juan Ignacio Zoido's deputy in the interior ministry—came under pressure after being accused of revealing details of the ongoing investigations to González's brother in a private meeting held on 8 March 2017.
  By mid-May, the string of scandals had splattered Cristina Cifuentes, incumbent president of Madrid, who was accused by the Civil Guard of having been involved in the contract-awarding procedures that led to her party's illegal financing between 2007 and 2012. By this time, it was also concluded that Esperanza Aguirre had won the 2007 and 2011 regional elections unfairly, with her campaign budgets well above those legally declared, through a system that "hurted political pluralism". Allegedly, these illegal funds were also used by Mariano Rajoy's campaign in the 2008 general election. Suspicions of embezzlement in the Community of Madrid reached as far back as 2001, during Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón's tenure, whose cabinet at the time was put under investigation by the Civil Guard. In the meantime, a separate investigation by the National Police into the ongoing scandals involving the family of former Catalan president Jordi Pujol linked former labour minister Manuel Pimentel and Ignacio López del Hierro, husband of María Dolores de Cospedal—incumbent defence minister and PP secretary-general—to another corruption plot in Africa, with connections to the Lezo scandal.
  As a result of the s
caption: PP veteran Esperanza Aguirre was forced out from politics after her former protégé Ignacio González came involved in the Lezo scandal.
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