Sumar official Iñigo Errejón resigns amid nationwide #MeToo witch hunt in Spain

A ferocious #MeToo campaign, backed by the entire media and political establishment, has attacked Iñigo Errejón for a week. Errejón, 40, co-founded the Podemos party with Pablo Iglesias in 2014 and split from it to form Más Madrid (More Madrid) in 2018 and Más País (More Country) in 2019. Last year, Más País joined the Sumar Front, led by Deputy Prime Minister Yolanda Díaz, for the Spanish elections. As Sumar’s parliamentary spokesman, he was a top official of the PSOE-Sumar government.

Iñigo Errejón (Photo by eldiario.es / Marta Jara / CC BY-SA 4.0)

Despite WSWS’s well-documented disagreements with Errejón and Podemos, it unequivocally condemns this baseless and reactionary witch hunt against him. Errejón has been forced to resign due to a hysterical media campaign that has failed to uncover any allegations of criminal behavior.

Tens of thousands of innocent women and children in Gaza are being murdered by the Israeli regime, with weapons supplied by the PSOE-Podemos and PSOE-Sumar governments. This has been covered up not only by Errejón, but by all the wealthy Podemos-affiliated feminist agents who are now attacking him. Genocide and mass murder matter far less to the self-centered, middle-class #MeToo milieu than the fact that several women had encounters with Errejón that they concluded were unsatisfactory.

Last Tuesday, journalist Cristina Fallarás, a leader of Spain’s #MeToo movement, posted an anonymous text on Instagram about a “well-known politician from Madrid,” who was quickly identified as Errejón. It said: ‘He is a psychological abuser. This is the pattern he uses: in the beginning he is extremely friendly to draw you in, and once he feels he has accomplished something, the dismissive behavior and gaslighting begin (…) In the afternoon he shows affection and proposes even a relationship, and two hours later he kicks you out of his house. If you do something he doesn’t like, he punishes you with silence and indifference.”

On Wednesday, Díaz contacted Errejón by phone from a Spanish-Portuguese summit and reportedly asked him for an explanation. On the same day, Lara Hernández, secretary of the Sumar organization, contacted Errejón to gather more information. During this telephone conversation, Errejón allegedly admitted to committing ‘machismo’.

On Thursday, amid extensive media attention, Errejón resigned and announced he was leaving politics. About X he said: ‘I have reached the limit of the contradiction between the public persona and the person. Between a neoliberal way of life and being the spokesperson of a movement that advocates a new, fairer and more human world. Ideological struggle is also a struggle to build better ways of life and relationships – more caring, more supportive and therefore freer.”

Last night, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez told journalists: “This is a very unpleasant moment, but we have taken action. This case is particularly painful for a feminist government, but the key is how it responds. As soon as the situation became known, Yolanda (Díaz) acted quickly and decisively.”

Television, radio and social media in Spain are now flooded with messages portraying Errejón as a predator, with rumors swirling about alleged drug use and sex addiction, with the refrain that ‘everyone knew it’. His father is hounded by the press to make statements against his own son.

The role of Cristina Fallarás

Fallarás, who launched the campaign, has built her career around the middle-class #MeToo movement. In April 2018, after MeToo emerged in the US, she launched the hashtag #Cuéntalo (“Tell It”), which generated nearly 3 million tweets, including 50,000 with testimonies of alleged rape or abuse.

After last year’s campaign against the former president of the Spanish Football Federation Luis Rubiales, for kissinging midfielder Jennifer Hermoso during the World Cup medal ceremony, Fallarás began posting under #SeAcabo (“It’s over”), which was central to Rubiales’ witch hunt. Rubiales is now facing charges over his kiss at the National Court, which tries major crimes such as crimes against humanity and terrorism.

In July 2018, Fallarás was nominated to the Spanish Public Radio and Television Council at the request of Podemos. In the 2019 local elections, she was part of the Podemos electoral list for the local branches in Barcelona. The following year, she received an award from then Minister of Equality and leading Podemos member Irene Montero, for her role in the launch of #MeToo and #Cuéntalo.

Over the weekend, Fallarés escalated the campaign and posted more anonymous texts, allegedly about Errejón, that did not describe any crime. One complained: “I wasn’t enjoying the sex, his mission was to please himself.” Another said he would “send me home immediately” after sex.

The campaign lacks broad support, despite extensive media coverage. In numerous comments on news articles, readers have defended the presumption of innocence, questioned the classification of the charges as sexual abuse, and compared Fallarás to a feminist Tomás de Torquemada – the first Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition, charged with “upholding Catholic religious views’. orthodoxy” against Muslims and Jews in the feudal era.

The complaint about a sexual crime by actress Elisa Mouliaá

After Errejón resigned, actress and TV host Elisa Mouliaá filed a sexual offenses complaint against him. The complaint quickly leaked to the press. In it, Mouliaá describes events on an evening in September 2021, which at best show unwise behavior, but not a crime.

According to the complaint, she attended a book launch by Errejón. Until then, the two did not know each other personally, although they had been exchanging messages via social media for a year. After the public event, Mouliaá invited him to a party organized by her friends in an apartment in Madrid. While they were in the elevator, Mouliaá said Errejón “grabbed her firmly by the waist” and started kissing her “in a way that left her breathless and violent,” making her feel “very intimidated.”

Nevertheless, Mouliaá said she “danced, drank and talked” and then started dancing with a friend, which “must have caused a jealous reaction” in Errejón. She says he then “grabbed her firmly by the arm and forcibly led her approximately twenty feet down a hallway to a room in the house.”

Once inside, “he locked the door to prevent the complainant from escaping and began kissing and touching the complainant on various parts of her body … without the complainant’s consent,” the police report said. Errejón then allegedly “pushed the complainant onto the bed,” exposed himself and touched her breasts. Mouliaá said she felt “paralyzed and did not agree with what was happening.”

But she and Errejón went back to the party after she asked him to stop, and Mouliaá then agreed to leave the party with Errejón and go to his house within 20 minutes. Mouliaá claims she agreed to “put an end to everything that was happening as quickly as possible.”

Mouliaá, who was allegedly groped twice by Errejón that night, willingly went to his apartment. On the way to his home, Mouliaá said she received a call from her father, who told her that Mouliaá’s young daughter had a high fever. Her account then blames Errejón for a “cold and unfeeling” attitude, not offering to take her to her parents’ house but continuing to his house.

After they arrived, Errejón touched her over her clothes. Mouliaá felt uncomfortable and asked him, “Don’t you understand seduction, timing and listening?” to which he responded by thanking her and saying this would help him in future encounters. She then called a taxi and left his house. Mouliaá told it El Diario.es that they spoke after the incident and that Errejón apologized.

The right-wing identity politics of the prosperous middle class

Spanish official politics and media are now not dominated by the genocide in Gaza, the war in the Middle East, the danger of nuclear war between NATO and Russia over Ukraine, or the PSOE-Sumar government’s preparation of an austerity budget aimed at the workers – but through these baseless accusations. This has nothing to do with defending the democratic rights of working women. On the contrary, it is creating a frenzy among the pro-imperialist activists of the #MeToo milieu.

Former Equality Minister and Podemos MEP Irene Montero stated on X that “in any case of sexual violence, the victims and those who support them come first.” She emphasized that the main goal is for victims “to not feel alone, to feel protected rather than afraid, and to ensure that ending impunity is part of their healing.”

Montero did not share the same sentiments in July 2022, when she agreed with the PSOE to remain silent about the barbaric massacre of Melilla committed by her government, when the repression of Spanish border security forces led to a stampede that killed at least 37 refugees. With seventy others still missing, the final death toll is likely over a hundred.

The middle-class hysteria against machismo is invariably linked to the demand for more female representation in corporate boardrooms, at the top of academia or in the civil service. But it is never associated with resistance to the super-exploitation and social distress suffered by workers of all genders or sexual orientations.

The middle-class pseudo-left articles have been at the forefront of the witch hunt. The feminist Free and Combative Front of the Revolutionary Left has expressed its “disgust, sheer disgust and even more disgust.” A huge, angry outcry over the revelation that the so-called prince (…) was in reality a sexist predator accused by a dozen women of abuse, domination and assault.”

The Morenoite Workers’ Revolutionary Current (CRT) claimed that the Errejón case “has exposed the double standards of those who claimed they would ‘change everything’ under the ‘most feminist government in history’ while condemning sexist and abusive behavior towards women. Many of their political colleagues and allies have stood complicitly silent.”

Their support for the witch hunt against Errejón shows that these organizations speak for social strata of the prosperous middle class, which have no perspective to fight imperialist war, social inequality and fascism. There is nothing democratic, progressive or, much less, socialist about them.

Class-conscious workers and youth must steadfastly oppose the campaign against Errejón, which is being incited by the political establishment and the media. The hysteria reflects the ruling class’s deep-seated fear that it is losing its political-ideological control over the working class under circumstances where the same conditions that lead to world war are fueling a revival of class struggle in Spain, Europe and internationally.