It has not taken 24 hours this time for the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, to react to one of the derivatives of the Salazar case, after elDiario.es revealed this Sunday the protection provided by Antonio Hernández to the behavior of his boss and friend, according to the complainants.
The Council of Ministers next Tuesday will remove Hernández from his position as director of the Political Coordination department in the Cabinet of the Presidency of the Government. The departure has been coordinated by Sánchez’s chief of staff, Diego Rubio, and the first vice president, María Jesús Montero, this same Sunday, despite the fact that the person who was mentioned by the complainants as an accomplice and accessory for Salazar denied the facts, as did the members of his department who were questioned about the scandal.
Sources from Moncloa assure that Hernández’s dismissal has been “agreed”, after the Presidency read in this newspaper the map of power that in the Government and in the PSOE turned Salazar into someone unpunished: “He himself understood that since the publication of the complaints in which he appeared reflected by the victims, his situation was unsustainable and, obviously, from the Government, upon also learning of the facts by elDiario.es, it acted immediately and “Despite the fact that Hernández denies the facts, the president and vice president have understood that he had to step aside for the good of the Government.”
Montero has also decided to remove him from the Executive of the PSOE of Andalusia, where Hernández was responsible for the Secretariat of Data, Analysis and Foresight, although José Antonio Rodríguez Salas and Francisco Rodríguez, two socialists very close to Sánchez’s former advisor, remain in the leadership for the moment.
Salazar had Antonio Hernández in Moncloa as a man of his greatest personal confidence and he always acted as his ‘number two’. Although he presents himself as an “expert in Electoral Campaign Management, Political and Social Sciences”, the official qualification that he accredits in his profile on the transparency portal is a Professional Training degree as a Technical Specialist in Advertising. Until now, as director of the Department of Political Coordination of the Cabinet of the Presidency of the Government, he was in charge of a large team of qualified professionals at the highest level.
Part of that team, made up mostly of women, has suffered Salazar’s “humiliating, humiliating and misogynistic” behavior according to the complaints. One of the victims stated in her complaint that none of Francisco Salazar’s behavior towards women “would have been possible without the special collaboration of his loyal Antonio Hernández Espinal.” “A man – adds the writing recorded on the PSOE anti-harassment channel by one of the complainants – who spent his life doing pedagogy so that we would not see Paco and his behavior for what they were. Antonio constantly gaslighted us, making us doubt our perceptions and our own reality. He told us tirelessly that we did not value the place we were in, that anyone would kill to be us.”
Another of Salazar and Hernández’s collaborators in the Executive’s engine room explains it in a more graphic way. “Antonio is Paco’s butler.” Both worked under the orders of Pedro Sánchez’s first chief of staff, Iván Redondo, who was dismissed in 2021 within the framework of a government restructuring that the president faced, and from which Salazar also left, although two years later he would return to La Moncloa.
Those harassed by Salazar did not file a complaint with the Government, but they did file a complaint with the PSOE anti-harassment channel, so in Moncloa until this Sunday they were not aware of the role played by Hernández in the face of Salazar’s sexist attitudes, which they consider “fundamental” for Sánchez’s former advisor to act with impunity.
Source: www.eldiario.es
