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

A fierce #MeToo campaign, supported by the entire media and political establishment, has been targeting Iñigo Errejón for the past week. Errejón, 40, co-founded the Podemos party with Pablo Iglesias in 2014, then 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, ahead of the Spanish elections. As Sumar’s parliamentary spokesman, he was a leading official of the PSOE-Sumar government.

Íñigo Errejón (Photo: eldiario.es / Marta Jara / CC BY-SA 4.0)

Despite the well-documented differences between the WSWS and Errejón and Podemos, it unequivocally condemns this baseless and reactionary campaign against him. Errejón was forced to resign following a hysterical media campaign that revealed no allegations of wrongdoing.

Tens of thousands of innocent women and children in Gaza are being murdered by the Israeli regime using weapons supplied by the PSOE-Podemos and PSOE-Sumar governments. This covered up not only Errejón, but all the wealthy feminists associated with Podemos who are now attacking him. Indeed, for the self-absorbed middle-class #MeToo community, genocide and mass murder matter far less than the fact that several women had meetings with Errejón that they found unsatisfactory.

Last Tuesday, journalist Cristina Fallarás, leader of the Spanish #MeToo movement, posted an anonymous text on Instagram about a “famous politician from Madrid”, who was soon identified as Errejón. It was written: ‘He is a perpetrator of psychological violence. He uses this pattern: at first he is extremely friendly, wants to draw you in, and when he feels that he has achieved something, he starts behaving disrespectfully and rushing (…) In the afternoon, he shows affection and even suggests a relationship, and two hours later he throws you out of the house. If you do something he doesn’t like, he punishes you with silence and indifference.

On Wednesday, Díaz reached Errejón by phone during the Spanish-Portuguese summit and reportedly asked him for an explanation. On the same day, the secretary of the Sumar Organization, Lara Hernández, contacted Errejón to obtain more information. During this conversation, Errejón allegedly admitted to “machismo”.

On Thursday, amid ubiquitous media reports, Errejón resigned and announced he was leaving politics. WX said: “I have reached the limit of contradiction between public figure and person. Between a neoliberal lifestyle and being a spokesman for a movement advocating for a new, fairer and more humane world. The ideological struggle is also a struggle to build better ways of life and relationships – more caring, more supportive, and therefore more free.”

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

Television, radio and social media in Spain are currently flooded with reports portraying Errejón as a predator, spreading rumors of alleged drug use and sex addiction, with the refrain that “everyone knew.” The press encourages his father to make statements against his son.

The role of Cristina Fallarás

Fallarás, who initiated the campaign, has built her career around the middle-class #MeToo movement. In April 2018, after the emergence of MeToo in the US, she launched the hashtag #Cuéntalo (“Say it”), which generated almost 3 million tweets, including 50,000 containing testimonies of alleged rape or molestation.

After last year’s campaign against the former president of the Spanish football federation, Luis Rubiales, for a kissing Midfielder Jennifer Hermoso during the World Cup medal ceremony Fallarás began posting under the hashtag #SeAcabo (“It’s over”), which was the focus of the Rubiales witch hunt. Rubiales is now facing charges for the kiss in the National Court, which hears serious crimes such as crimes against humanity and terrorism.

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

Over the weekend, Fallarés intensified the campaign by publishing more anonymous text messages purporting to be about Errejón, which do not describe any crimes. One of them complained: “I didn’t enjoy sex, his mission was to satisfy himself.” Another said she would “send me (home) immediately” after intercourse.

The campaign lacks broad support, despite widespread media coverage. In countless comments on news articles, readers defended the presumption of innocence, questioned the classification of the allegations as sexual harassment and compared Fallarás to the feminist Tomás de Torquemada – the first Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition, whose task was to “support Catholic religious orthodoxy” against Muslims and Jews during the era feudal.

Actress Elisa Mouliaá’s complaint regarding a sexual offense

After Errejón’s resignation, actress and TV presenter Elisa Mouliaá filed a sexual offense complaint against him. The complaint quickly leaked to the press. Mouliaá details events one night in September 2021 that, at best, indicate unwise behavior but do not constitute a crime.

The complaint states that she attended the presentation of Errejón’s book. Until then, they had not known each other personally, although they had exchanged messages on social media for a year. After the public event, Mouliaá invited him to a party organized by her friends at an apartment in Madrid. In the elevator, Mouliaá said Errejón “grabbed her tightly around the waist” and started kissing her “in a way that left her breathless and brutal”, making her feel “very intimidated”.

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

Once inside, “he closed the door to prevent the complainant from escaping and began kissing and touching the complainant in various parts of her body (…) without her consent,” the police report reads. Errejón then allegedly “pushed the complainant onto the bed”, exposed himself and touched her breasts. Mouliaá said she felt “paralyzed and did not consent to anything that happened.”

However, she and Errejón returned to the party after she asked him to stop, and Mouliaá agreed to leave the party with Errejón in 20 minutes and go to his house. Mouliaá says she agreed to “end everything that was happening as quickly as possible.”

Mouliaá, who was allegedly groped twice by Errejón that evening, willingly went to his apartment. On the way home, Mouliaá said her father called her and told her that Mouliaá’s daughter had a high fever. Her account then blames Errejón for his “cold and unfeeling” attitude because he did not offer to take her to her parents’ house but went to him.

Upon arrival, Errejón touched 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 that it would help him in future encounters. She then called a taxi and left his house. Mouliaá said El Diario.es that they talked after the incident and that Errejón apologized.

The right-wing identity politics of the affluent middle class

Spain’s official politics and media are currently dominated not by the genocide in Gaza, the war in the Middle East, the danger of a NATO-Russian nuclear war over Ukraine, or the PSOE-Sumar government’s preparation of an austerity budget aimed at workers – but by these baseless allegations. This has nothing to do with defending the democratic rights of working women. Rather, it serves to incite a frenzy among pro-imperialist agents of the #MeToo environment.

Former Minister of Equality and Podemos MEP Irene Montero stated in X that “in every case of sexual violence, the most important thing is the victims and those supporting them.” She stressed that the main goal is for victims “not to feel alone, for them to feel protected, not afraid, and for ending impunity to be part of their healing.”

Montero did not have the same feelings in July 2022 when she agreed with the PSOE to remain silent on the barbaric massacre in Melilla committed by her government, when a crackdown on Spanish border security forces led to a stampede that killed at least 37 refugees. With 70 other people still missing, the final death toll is likely to exceed 100.

Middle-class hysteria against machismo is invariably linked to demands for greater representation of women on corporate boards, at the highest levels of academia or in the civil service. However, it is never associated with opposition to super-exploitation and social unrest experienced by workers of all genders and sexual orientations.

Pseudo-leftist middle-class articles came to the fore in the witch hunt. The Feminist Front for Freedom and Struggle of the Revolutionary Left announced its “disgust, pure disgust and even more disgust. Enormous, furious outrage at the revelation that the so-called the prince (…) was in fact a sexist predator accused by several women of harassment, domination and ill-treatment.”

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

Their support for the campaign against Errejón shows that these organizations speak on behalf of social layers of the wealthy middle class that have no prospect of opposing imperialist war, social inequality and fascism. There is nothing democratic, progressive or even socialist about them.

Class-conscious workers and youth must vigorously oppose the campaign against Errejón waged by the political establishment and the media. Her hysteria reflects the deep-seated fear of the ruling class that it is losing its political-ideological control over the working class in conditions where the same conditions that led to world war are fueling a resurgence of class struggle in Spain, Europe and internationally.