A ferocious #MeToo campaign, supported by the entire media and political establishment, has targeted 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 spokesperson, he was a top PSOE-Sumar government official.
Notwithstanding WSWS’ well-documented differences with Errejón and Podemos, it unequivocally condemns this baseless and reactionary witch-hunt against him. Errejón has been forced to step down based on a hysterical media campaign that has not uncovered any allegations of criminal conduct.
Tens of thousands of innocent women and children in Gaza are being murdered by the Israeli regime, with weapons provided by the PSOE-Podemos and PSOE-Sumar governments. This has been covered up not only by Errejón, but by all the affluent, Podemos-linked feminist operatives now attacking him. Indeed, genocide and mass murder matter far less, for the self-absorbed, middle class #MeToo milieu, than the fact that several women had encounters with Errejón that they concluded were unsatisfying.
Last Tuesday, journalist Cristina Fallarás, a leader of Spain’s #MeToo movement, posted an anonymous text on Instagram about a “well-known politician of Madrid,” who was soon identified as Errejón. It said, “He's a psychological abuser. This is the pattern he uses: he's extremely friendly at first to draw you in, and once he feels he's achieved something, the dismissive behavior and gaslighting begin […] In the afternoon, he shows affection and even suggests 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 explanations. On the same day, Sumar Organisation Secretary Lara Hernández reached out to Errejón to gather more information. During this call, Errejón allegedly admitted to “machismo.”
On Thursday, amid wall-to-wall media coverage, Errejón resigned and announced he was abandoning politics. On 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 for a movement that advocates for a new, fairer, and more humane world. Ideological struggle is also a struggle to build better ways of life and relationships—more caring, more supportive, and therefore freer.”
Yesterday evening, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez told journalists, “This is a very unpleasant moment, but we’ve taken action. This case is particularly painful for a feminist government, but the key is how one responds. As soon as the situation became known, Yolanda [Díaz] acted swiftly and decisively.”
Television, radio and social media in Spain are now flooded with reports casting Errejón as a predator, circulating rumors of alleged drug use and sex addiction, with the refrain that “everyone knew.” His father is being hounded by the press to make statements against his own son.
The role of Cristina Fallarás
Fallarás, who launched the campaign, has 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 testimony of alleged rape or abuse.
After last year’s campaign against former Spanish football federation president Luis Rubiales, for kissing midfielder Jennifer Hermoso during the World Cup medal ceremony, Fallarás began posting under #SeAcabo (“It’s Over”), which was central to the Rubiales witch-hunt. Rubiales now faces charges over his kiss in the National Court, which tries major offenses such as crimes against humanity and terrorism.
In July 2018, Fallarás was nominated to Spain’s public radio and television board at Podemos' request. In the 2019 local elections, she was part of Podemos’ local branch electoral list 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 escalated the campaign, posting more anonymous texts, allegedly about Errejón, that do not describe any crimes. One complained, “I didn’t enjoy the sex, his mission was to satisfy himself.” Another said that after having sex, “he would send me [home] right away.”
The campaign lacks widespread support, despite wall-to-wall media coverage. In countless comments on news articles, readers have defended the presumption of innocence, questioned the classification of the allegations as sexual abuse, and likened Fallarás to a feminist Tomás de Torquemada—the first Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition, tasked with “upholding Catholic religious orthodoxy” against Muslims and Jews in the feudal era.
Actress Elisa Mouliaá’s sexual offence complaint
After Errejón resigned, actress and TV presenter Elisa Mouliaá filed a sexual offence complaint against him. The complaint quickly leaked to the press. In it, Mouliaá details events one night in September 2021, that at most show ill-advised behavior, but no crime.
According to the complaint, she attended a book presentation by Errejón. Until then, the two did not know each other personally, although they had exchanged messages for a year via social media. After the public event, Mouliaá invited him to a party hosted at an apartment in Madrid by her friends. While in the elevator, Mouliaá said Errejón “grabbed her tightly by the waist” and began kissing her “in a way that left her breathless and was violent,” making her feel “very intimidated.”
Nonetheless, Mouliaá said she “danced, drank, and chatted” and then began dancing with a friend, which “must have caused a jealous reaction” in Errejón. She says he then “grabbed her tightly by the arm and forcefully led her about six meters down a hallway into a room in the house.”
Once inside, “he locked the door to prevent the complainant from escaping, beginning to kiss and touch the complainant in various parts of her body [...] without the complainant's consent,” the police report states. Errejón then allegedly “pushed the complainant onto the bed,” exposed himself and touched her breasts. Mouliaá said she felt “paralysed and did not consent to anything that happened.”
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 in 20 minutes and go to his home. Mouliaá claims that she agreed “to end everything that was happening as soon as possible.”
Mouliaá, who supposedly had been groped twice that night by Errejón, went willingly to his apartment. On the way to his home, Mouliaá said she received a call from her father, telling 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’ home but continuing on to his place.
After they arrived, Errejón touched her over her clothing, Mouliaá felt uncomfortable and asked him, “don’t you understand seduction, timing, and listening?” to which he responded by thanking her and saying that would help him in future encounters. She then called a taxi and left his home. Mouliaá told El Diario.es that they spoke after the incident and that Errejón apologised.
The right-wing identity politics of the affluent middle class
Spanish official politics and media are now dominated not by the genocide in Gaza, war across the Middle East, the danger of a NATO-Russia nuclear war over Ukraine, or the PSOE-Sumar government’s preparation of an austerity budget targeting the workers—but by these baseless allegations. This has nothing to do with a defense of the democratic rights of working women. Rather, it serves to whip up a frenzy amid the pro-imperialist operatives 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 supporting them come first.” She emphasised that the main goal is for victims “not to feel alone, to feel protected rather than fearful, and to ensure that ending impunity is part of their healing.”
Montero did not have these same feelings in July 2022, when she agreed with the PSOE to keep silent about the barbaric Melilla massacre committed by her government, when the repression of Spain’s border security forces led to a stampede killing at least 37 refugees. With 70 others still missing, the final death toll is probably over 100.
The middle class hysteria against machismo is invariably tied to demands for more female representation in company boardrooms, the top echelons of academia, or the civil service. But it is never associated with opposition to the super-exploitation and social distress suffered by workers of all genders or sexual orientations.
The middle class pseudo-left articles have taken front stage in the witch-hunt. Revolutionary Left’s feminist Free and Combative front has declared its “Disgust, sheer disgust, and even more disgust. Immense, raging indignation at the revelation that the so-called prince […] was, in reality, a sexist predator accused by a dozen women of abuse, domination, and mistreatment.”
The Morenoite Workers’ Revolutionary Current (CRT), claimed the Errejón case has exposed “the double standard of those who claimed they would ‘change everything’ under the ‘most feminist government in history’ while exhibiting reprehensible sexist and abusive behavior towards women. Many of their political colleagues and allies have remained complicitly silent.”
Their support for the witch-hunt against Errejón shows that these organisations speak for social layers of the affluent middle class, who have no perspective to oppose 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 being whipped up by the political establishment and media. Its hysteria reflects the deep-seated fear of the ruling class that it is losing its political-ideological control over the working class under conditions were the same conditions leading to world war are fueling a resurgence of the class struggle in Spain, Europe and internationally.